Coffee Logic
I don't pretend to know much of anything regarding business. I don't have a degree in marketing and nor am I affiliated in any sense of the word with the business community. However, along with many other armchair quarterbacks, every once in awhile something peaks my curiosity enough to question the logistics and the thought processes of particular businesses.

I've written previously about coffeeshops for various reasons, and I'm not sure what causes them to continuously provide fodder for thought. Apparently, they serve as some sort of nexus or ground zero for the testing of marketing ideas that stretch across a wide strata of areas and differing approaches to lure in that ideal customer. I think I've pretty much seen it all when it comes to the diversifying tactics coffeeshop owners employ, and that's saying a lot considering that this medium size big city, Pittsburgh, has a certain finite amount of growth available for burgeoning businesses. Coffeeshops here are abundant. Almost circuslike in their approach, the varying array of enticements offered by coffeeshops seems endless in imagination and tact. I'm not sure how well they are received, and I'd be curious to know how many ventures are abandoned wholeheartedly after a brief trial run without success. There's only so much you can do to attract people, and there's only so much people will be willing to endure in order to obtain a simple cup of coffee. Case in point, one of my favorite shops, the Beehive, went through a radical transformation and expansion scheme that seems to only have as its end purpose the engulfing of the entire city block in which it is located. I was on a forced leave from the shop, but I've since returned to its confines with positive results.

Recently, the Southside Works has begun opening new businesses in an effort to revitalize a once empty, unprofitable chunk of land. The effort, which can only be described as the opening salvo in what promises to be a large scale battle between rival shopping complexes, has yielded one curiosity, two coffeeshops within a block of one another. Sure, on the outset that doesn't seem strange when in this town rival shops are on opposite corners, but what makes this an oddity is that the location itself is on, what I would term, the outskirts of the Southside. There isn't much roadway left before you exit a developed area and enter the forested in-between wasteland that separates the Southside from Homestead. In other words, the location is something that can only sustain itself by continuously feeding its competing retailers to each other. So the two coffeeshops are forced to compete for, what I would assume to be, a limited amount of pedestrian traffic and the business derived from the office inhabitants surrounding the complex, which I don't believe to be that numerous.

Quite possibly, the most puzzling aspect of this is that one shop, Crazy Mocha, which beat its rival, Caribou Coffee, opened first, starts the day at six in the morning! Running past this empty establishment, I couldn't help but wonder who they thought they would be serving at this early of an hour when no other shops close by are open. Residential housing isn't nearby, and the always burdensome aspect of parking seems to rule out anyone stopping in on their way to work. Like I said, I don't claim to understand business, but when this very same chain closes a shop in the heart of the University of Pittsburgh's campus, one has to wonder who is making the decisions here and for what reason. I drink a lot of coffee, but I wouldn't want to have to sell it if my life depended on it based on the backwards logic implied by the strategies employed by the shillers of the bean.