Guess what, dear dreamers? The psychological gap between working in a cafe because it's fun and romantic and doing the exact same thing because you have to is enormous.
Indeed.
Passion is great, loving your work is great, but a business cares not a fig for anything other than the bottom line.
An example, nearly every bookstore opened here in the last 20 years deployed some variation on the cozy armchair/reading nook theme, even Barnes & Noble. It fits the romantic notion of a bookstore as a sort of extension of the customer's personal library, soft and cozy, in defiance of the hard mercantilism of those other types of businesses.
The reality of a comfortable chair is noted by the author thusly:
But how much of it could we sell? Discarding food as a self-canceling expense at best, the coffee needed to account for all of our profit. We needed to sell roughly $500 of it a day. This kind of money is only achievable through solid foot traffic, but, of course, our cafe was too cozy and charming to pop in for a cup to go. The average coffee-to-stay customer nursed his mocha (i.e., his $5 ticket) for upward of 30 minutes. Don't get me started on people with laptops.
A bookstore is different from a cafe, in that you don't need to actively court turnover to make your nut. But what happens is your comfortable chairs attract not customers, but campers. Vagrants who want to take a load off and read a free book, students who prefer studying in a calm, pleasant store to their own squalid, student infested dwellings. And these non-customers prevent customers from using the chairs as you intended- as an inviting transition between the bookshelves and the cash register.
Too many retail entrepreneurs cling to their vision of that cozy chair long after it's been colonized by confirmed non-customers. Being in business demands a certain level of gimlet-eyed realism, ideally swept basilisk-like across the vista before the doors open wide.
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