Is the wave of coffee shop closures really coming? Detailed explanation of the reasons for closure | sizi99 slot, hppoker pro

Author: Dawang Roadside Stall

Last weekend, a well-known self-media person complained in the group that because the owner of a relatively high-end coffee shop - Coffee Warehouse ran away, she had to defend her rights for the first time in her life, but there was no way to defend her rights, and there was little hope of recovering the 5,000 yuan membership recharge.

This matter caught my attention because there is also a coffee shop near my community. I ran over there yesterday afternoon to take a look, and sure enough, it was closed.

The experience of this industry colleague reminds me of the last night of the Wudaokou "Carving Time" cafe on January 14, two months ago.

Just yesterday, news broke that the famous Zoo Coffee has closed down. These are just a few new cases of the closure of coffee shops in Beijing in recent years.

The closure of several well-known brand cafes in Beijing has aroused discussion in the media circle. This phenomenon occurs at the moment when Luckin Coffee and Starbucks are in fierce battle, so it seems to be of great research value.

People working in the media industry are often heavy users of coffee shops. Even people like me who rarely drink coffee will visit frequently. It just so happens that the street where I started living in 2015, Guanghua North Street on the south side of Guomao in Chaoyang District, is an area with very dense cafes, so my fragmented thinking over the past ten years has recently formed some conclusions.

Is it because of the siphon effect of Luckin and Starbucks investing heavily in marketing? I'm afraid it's not that simple.

01Scenery consumption and cafe social cultureThe classic movie "The Godfather", known as the "Men's Bible", opens with the teachingThe father said to the owner of the funeral home who asked for help because his daughter was being bullied: "I can't help with this. We have known each other for many years, and this is the first time you have asked me for help. My wife is the godmother of your only daughter, and I can't remember when you invited me to your house for coffee." This opening dialogue inadvertently shows a Western culture: drinking coffee is a daily habit of every Western household, and it is also a normal way of hospitality.

When a behavior becomes the collective memory of an era, it will produce a cultural accumulation in a social sense. From this perspective, there is a coffee culture in the West, but even though the coffee consumption of Chinese people has been increasing year by year, there is still no obvious coffee culture. This is very similar to how Westerners also drink tea and have a very different way of drinking tea from Chinese people, but there is no obvious tea culture.

I heard that the Zoo Coffee downstairs was closed down, and the owner of the cafe and my gay friend Yang Miao said:

"In a cafe, the taste of the coffee is the least important." Although this statement may be dismissive of peers, it does hit the key to running a cafe.

On June 6, 2018, on the occasion of the opening of Starbucks Shanghai flagship store, CBS published an article titled "Thanks to Millennials, China Embraces Coffee Culture." The author of the article interviewed a former Apple employee who opened a coffee shop in Shanghai. He said:

"China has a very young group that is influenced by the West. Showing up at a coffee shop you recognize is now a way for (Chinese young people) to express themselves and identify themselves - the products they consume, the food they buy and the coffee they drink." I think this article is quite reasonable, except for the slightly optimistic title. In other words, in China, where there is no coffee culture, young people with strong spending power actually regard drinking coffee as a kind of consumption with an identity recognition function. They are actually engaging in scene consumption, which is a social behavior.

In fact, long before Wang Dawei, known as the "Father of McDonald's in China", first brought Starbucks to China in 1999, China's big cities had chain brands such as Shangdao Coffee. As the number of cafes in Chinese cities continues to rise, cafes have actually become social places. With the arrival of brands such as Starbucks and Costa, specialty coffee has added some dimensions to this social place.

Obviously, coffee culture and cafe social culture are not the same concept. The vast majority of Chinese consumers buy coffee when they enter coffee shops.The added value of the scene of the product.

Speaking of this, a question has surfaced: Although it is difficult to say that coffee culture has sprouted, have the large number of coffee shops in Chinese cities given birth to some coffee shop social culture?

In the era of constantly upgrading consumption, the social added value provided by a cafe is the essential difference between it and other cafes or restaurants. From this perspective, it is not Luckin and Starbucks that take away a large number of coffee shop customers, but social apps represented by WeChat.

Unfortunately, wave after wave of coffee chain brands have not seriously considered this issue.

After consumers’ demand for interviews decreases and the space for selection expands, the lack of social and cultural labels or poor operation will inevitably lead to the loss of regular customers in the cafe and the reduction of new customers. And because unit area is occupied for a long time, the square footage efficiency of coffee shops is more important than in other retail industries. I talked to a friend who runs a cafe, and he said that in any location, if the average daily passenger flow cannot reach 1 person/square meter, it will definitely close down.

In fact, after the fact that coffeehouses have become an important place for Chinese people to socialize, except for a few cases, it is difficult to find traces of coffeehouse culture. And we all know a sociological common sense: a habit can only maintain vitality after it becomes a culture. In my opinion, this is the reason why there has been a wave of cafe closures in recent years: operators do not operate their own social and cultural tags.

02Psychological hints and social tag operationsSince it is a social place for selling added value products, the psychological hints given to consumers and the social cultural tags posted by themselves are particularly important. The two complement each other and aim to occupy the minds of consumers.

In these two aspects, the first set of negative cases I cited are Shangdao Coffee and Photosynthesis Study.

Among the many chain cafes in China, Shangdao Coffee is one of the earliest. This brand was active in the Beijing market until 2010. As an old brand with more than 20 years of history, Shangdao Coffee has sufficient first-mover and location advantages, but it was abandoned by consumers because it failed to follow the trend.

In fact, the decline of Shangdao Coffee is synchronized with the rise of Costa and Coffee with You. This fully reflects what I said above. After the arrival of the wave of consumption upgrades, the operators of Shangdao Coffee did not think about the business essence of "café consumption is actually consumption of social added value".

Originally, with the help of the world's first canned coffee brand born in Japan and with the same name, Taiwan's "Shangdao Coffee" had the right time, place and people. However, its operators are unwilling to make progress and rest on their laurels all year round. Consumers who have been to Shangdao Coffee should still remember that it not only lacks any social and cultural labels, but also lacks the work of giving psychological hints through simple decoration.

The consequence of this is that the added value of the products provided is increasingly unrecognizable, and it is inevitable to be eliminated by the market.

In the field of scene consumption, Photosynthesis Study, which was founded earlier than Shangdao Coffee, is another failure case.

Photosynthesis Study was established in 1995. Like Carving Time, the name is extraordinary and can be said to give consumers enough psychological hints. In fact, according to my observations more than ten years ago, the books inside Photosynthesis Study can indeed be called elegant. Its store next to the subway entrance in SOHO Modern City was once extremely popular.

However, my shopping experience inside is hardly satisfactory. The reason is that its hints, social tags and operations are disconnected. Consumers can only have three experiences in the store: buying books, buying small commodities and drinks, and occupying a seat to read and work. Since the bookshelf takes up a lot of space, its social space is greatly compressed. At the same time, operators have not deepened or amplified the "reading" aspect of their consumers' mental advantage. In contrast, Carving Time and One-Way Street Bookstore have done a lot of business operations related to reading and literary labels. The latter two are still struggling to survive in the new era. It is reasonable that Photosynthesis Bookstore was the first to collapse in 2011.

In fact, several Korean-style cafes that have become popular in the past few years have also been operating poorly and closed in large numbers in the past two years. Among them, the well-known brand "Coffee with You" endorsed by Kim Soo-hyun was investigated for suspected fraud by the Chaoyang Branch of the Beijing Public Security Bureau in 2015. The reason for their decline is similar to the above two. The social tags that were originally generated by the Korean wave (the influence of Korean dramas and Korean groups on the Chinese people), with the decline of Korean culture, were not strengthened through operational methods, and could only be replaced by newly emerging brands with brand-new social tags.

Guanghua North 1st Street, where the stall owner lives, is close to the International Trade Center and has convenient transportation. The surrounding residents have strong spending power. In just a few hundred meters, there used to be up to 7 cafes at the same time. If the coffee warehouse at R&F No. 10 is included, there are 8 cafes. This provides the stall owner with the best perspective to observe the rise and fall of cafes.

However, after observation, I can summarize the reasons for the failure of these eight cafes, which are nothing more than the failure of Shangdao Coffee and Photosynthesis Bookstore mentioned above: lack of social cultural labels, or poor label operation.

After I moved here on New Year’s Day in 2015, the first of the many cafes on this street to disappear was the town of Kawa. In 2012, our "Business Value" editorial department celebrated the birthday of a colleague in this cafe. Hu Weiwei was also there at that time. At that time, she was a reporter for "Business Value" and Chekou.

Kava Town is one of those coffee shops that has no social and cultural labels and no recognition. Shangdao Coffee, located next to the small town of Kawa, survived until 2017 due to brand inertia.

Due to the convenient transportation and the strong spending power of surrounding residents, after the two cafes closed down, several new cafes opened. However, only one of these new cafes is still in business.

Among the eight cafes on Guanghua North 1st Street, only one that still exists and is prospering is "Yue Coffee", and this is the only positive case in this article about the social and cultural labels of cafe operations.

Yue Coffee opened in 2012. The proprietress is the wife of a 360 executive and runs the coffee shop full-time.

In the late autumn of 2016, I met a reading club at Yue Coffee who holds activities here every week. Later, I shared with the reading club the reasons why Yue Coffee has become the "number one" on this street. In order to avoid suspicion of advertising, I did not use internal pictures and only described it in words.

First of all, the functional areas of Shiyue Coffee are very reasonably distributed and meet the various social needs of customers.

There are a total of 5 functional areas before Yue Coffee: outdoor cooling and smoking area; social function area in front of the large bookshelf on the first floor; reading and working area in front of the window on the first floor; sofa social area in the middle of the first floor; closed reading and working area on the first floor; and two large private rooms on the second floor. Wait.

It is not difficult to understand that the division of multiple functional areas is actually to attach multiple social tags to the cafe. For example, there are large bookshelves as high as the ceiling placed on the first floor wall of Yue Coffee, which obviously gives customers enough psychological hints. Indoor flowers throughout the year are another label of Yue Coffee. In fact, the book club has tried to change the gathering venue. However, after choosing, the private room of Yue Coffee is more suitable for holding activities. And for smokers like stall owners, having an outdoor area for smoking and viewing is really a bonus.

What is more important than labeling is that the proprietress regards the cafe as her own work and conducts refined operations.

For example, the first thing you see when you enter the door are two screens hanging in the air. One plays movies all year round, and the other plays videos of celebrities being interviewed in cafes or sports programs. This obviously adds a topical atmosphere to the cafe. The songs that are played daily in the coffee shop are a carefully selected library of healing and relaxing songs.

Starting from the summer of 2018, Yue Cafe has held music parties every Friday evening, with interactive performances by a community orchestra on the first floor, and the proprietress and her boys will also perform in person.

All of the above can only be achieved when operators and teams devote their energy and carry out continuous operational innovation. The effect of these operational innovations is that Yue Coffee has become one of the two most popular coffee shops in the Shuangjing area, the other being Starbucks in R&F Plaza.

Recently, due to chronic overcrowding and lack of seats, the proprietress removed the flowers and bicycles on the left side of the entrance and replaced them with a long and narrow reading and office area.

03Conclusion Two months ago, Monday, January 14, the Carving Time Cafe in Wudaokou, Beijing ushered in its "last night".

Nineteen years after opening the store in Beijing, in November 2016, the Beijing-Zhangjiakou Railway Qinghuayuan Railway Station with a history of more than 100 years was officially closed. Three level crossings, namely Wudaokou, Sidaokou and Shuangqing Road crossing, were subsequently demolished. This year, the rental contract for the Wudaokou Store of Carving Time was changed from a six-year contract to a three-year contract. Three years later, this literary and artistic label cafe, which opened next to China's most famous university, finally disappeared from Wudaokou.

In this era where even people’s fragmented time is filled with all kinds of information, even the carving time of operating literary and artistic social tags all year round is no longer sustainable, let alone those cafes that have not yet found their own clear social tags.

Lu Xun once wrote an article "Revolutionary Coffee Shop", which was included in "San Xian Ji". This is actually a rumor refuting article. The cause of the incident was that young people from the left-wing cultural group Creation Society opened a cafe in Shanghai and wrote a soft article in "Shenbao" as follows:

"But readers, I discovered such an ideal paradise. I went there twice. I met celebrities in today's literary and art circles there, such as Gong Binglu, Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, etc. I also got to know Meng Chao, Pan Hannian, Ye Lingfeng, etc. Some of them were talking loudly about their ideas, and some were meditating silently. I learned a lot from there. "You see, the revolutionary youth 90 years ago not only put the social and cultural labels of the cafe in place when they started their business, but also laid the groundwork to create a second wave of topical marketing. As soon as Lu Xun and Yu Dafu refuted the rumors, the cafe became even more popular.

The times are developing and productivity is improving, but business thinking may not necessarily progress. The owners of cafes all over China today are obviously much behind the entrepreneurs of Lu Xun’s era. In terms of business, whether it is Photosynthesis, Shangdao Coffee, Coffee with You, Coffee Library or Zoo, they all died from the lack of social cultural labels or poor operation.

However, amidst the noise of cafe closures, there are also those who are going against the trend. For example, Lian Coffee, an Internet coffee brand (Coffee Box) that started out by delivering errands to Starbucks and Costa, plans to open 50-60 image stores in first-tier cities in early 2019, focusing on high-quality business districts in core cities, according to 36Kr reports.

This means that Lian Coffee finally compromised with the market and used part of its chips to develop the offline coffee market, transitioning from "light assets" to "heavy assets". Obviously, even the people at the helm of coffee have realized that in China, where coffee culture has not yet been established, the social scene in coffee shops is still necessary.existence. However, for newcomers to the coffee shop industry, facing the rows of fallen "bodies" in front of them, how to create a social tag for a coffee shop and successfully operate it is a very big challenge.

Coincidentally, just as I was writing this article, I received an article push from the Yuecafe official account. The title of this article is: "The "leftovers" are king - the successful philosophy of community cafes."

In the article, the boss lady wrote:

"I will build a coffee shop with a community atmosphere. Such a coffee shop knows exactly what kind of people it serves, can undertake certain social functions, and can form an interesting ecosystem with surrounding residents and other shops. Such community shops are insignificant but full of vitality... As the "third space" of urban people, whether you like coffee or not, coffee shops have magical and self-evident healing effects for modern urbanites. They participate in your life, and you also shape their appearance. Son... I learned that the most popular coffee shop in the community had closed down, and the reason was unknown. I felt somewhat regretful when I heard this news, and at the same time, I felt sorry for myself. I feel a little proud. In the past seven years, we have not been the most successful, but we have persisted until the end." In this era where cultural products are extremely abundant and people's spare time is occupied by various apps, new challenges have been posed to cafe operators. Amid the wave of closures of coffee shops in Beijing, the exploration of Yue Coffee on Guanghua North Street may be an inspiration to other operators.