Love & Business

This amusing, accurate article neatly summarizes the inevitable fate of the dilettante businessperson. I've run into my share of these folk over the years, all of them deafened to warning advice by the siren song of their chosen retail paramour, usually restaurants. Bookstores once got the same romantic, nostalgic treatment, but the internet put a muddy boot on the throat of that particular daydream.

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.