I have a busy weekend ahead of me, and I got an early start this morning. Up early, graded an exam, got the results posted, and then I decided to reward myself by taking a nice walk downtown to the coffee shop.
It was closed.
There are three coffeeshops in Morris. One is in the middle of the grocery store, which gets enough of my money as it is, and doesn’t exactly have the desired coffeeshop ambience. The other two are owned by local churches. They have limited hours on Saturday, and are closed on Sundays. A college town where the coffeeshops are closed on Sundays! At least the bars are open, so you can drink a different beverage.
None of them cater to students anyway. I see a few faculty now and then, and rarely an occasional student at the coffeeshop I frequent, but more generally they’re marketing to old people.
NO COFFEE ON SUNDAYS!!!???
(I live in a secular country. Coffee, hockey and soccer are our substitutes for religion)
Doesn’t the university library have a coffee machine and a sitting area?
Morris is “A small prairie town with big city culture,” according to their website. Seems debatable. Also, it says the only liquor store allowed is one that’s owned by the town.
Retire. Open a coffee shop.
Sounds awful. Don’t.
I lived in a town of 460 for a couple of years (a couple years ago). Their was one actual coffee shop, but only open 3 or 4 days a week. There was also a co-op that had good hours 7 days a week and had a nice coffee shop. Current town is a bit bigger than yours, with limited options, but not THAT bad. It doesn’t hurt that both are on the California coast. ;-)
In my area you travel more than 3 miles without a Dunkin or Starbucks popping up. That doesn’t include the Seven Elevens, Quik Checks and WaWa(s). As for “The Local Coffee Shop” there are several, but they are few and far between, and usually located in the denser areas in one of the local towns.
I forgot, there are plenty of diners in my area, many with counters you can sit at and have a coffee and talk with the person next to you.
ANB “I lived in a town of 460” …. here in Yurp, that is not a town, it is barely a village.
Most bars have a pot of coffee brewing, either for Irish Coffee, or to sober up the barflys. Might be good for them to have a scientist as a regular. Just a thought.
Do the churches also run night clubs with no booze or dancing?
@ Jim Brady #8
Yeah, here in the western USA, human habitation has followed a different path from Europe. There was thousands of years of indigenous occupation, but that was largely nomadic. Then we European invaders came along, generally focused on extracting wealth as quickly as possible. This led to a lot of boom towns that often devastated the local ecology. Many of those towns of (temporarily) thousands of residents then were utterly abandoned when the resources were depleted, creating the infamous western ghost towns. But, sometimes, a few people ended up appreciating the area for itself, rather than what could be carted out of it, and they stayed, sometimes surviving on government checks. Some of these places can be heaven for a quiet soul, some of them are drug-ravaged hell holes, it is just the luck of the draw.
I’m near enough to Chicago that there’s a 24/7 Dunkins within a 3 minute drive of me. But I grew up farther out in a much smaller city and this reminded me of something that happened there.
The city I grew up in had a christian university. A distant relative, I think a second cousin of one of my parents, decided to open up an internet cafe there a couple decades ago. I interviewed for a job opening but they surprised me by hiring my friend instead. Which turned out to be a good thing as they turned out to be obnoxious micromanagers who blamed their messes on other people.
Their business model was a bit… fanciful. They tried to look upscale to cater to the professors and professionals in the area, while encouraging students not to linger. You can probably see their mistake already; students would have been much more frequent visitors who would buy more to have a place to hang out with their friends. Professionals and professors would grab a coffee and go. They don’t need to rent a computer. So the end result was they were trying to pay staff, rent, startup costs, and computer costs by selling coffee a few dollars a pop to a limited clientele that they were mostly trying to drive away. This had predictable results and some messy fallout due to bad management.
Something for PZ? “Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou – the world has ended. Enjoy your coffee.”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=Gm1lL7jIeJQ
A manga/anime about an android girl running a tiny café where the few guests talk about the slow end of the world.
It belongs to the Iyashikei genre of calming, pleasant stories. The anime version is beautiful, with lingering shots of the Japanese nature.
Was about to comment the same as Bruce. So all we need now, is a name. The Curmudgeon? Or The Coffee Web?
On a side note, I just had coffee infused liquorice. Delicious.
A lot of small-town coffeeshops are thinly-veiled Christian meeting places. We had one down the street from us, briefly. Good coffee, but they closed within a year. I’ve come across several others, in central OR and on the coast. You go in for good coffee but quickly realize that they are proselytizing establishments. Seems to be a “thing.”
There aren’t too many sit-down coffee shops in my town: they’ve mostly been replaced by drive-thru coffee stands.
Single use coffee cups; very civilised.
A town of 5000, with 1000 students should be able to support 2–3 coffee shops (scaling from the number here in Santa Cruz, with a population of 60,000 and 20,000 students), so it sounds like Morris has about the number the market would suggest. Only 10% of our coffee shops are church-related though, and even they are open on Sundays.