As someone who's spent a significant amount of my working life in food service, it's very weird to me that "running a coffee shop" is anything that anyone would ever conflate with "cozy" in the first place
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I think the fantasy is more about being so financially well off you can run a little business at a loss for the fun of it. I think people imagine a very low volume of customers when they think about it as cozy.
Also someone who ran multiple FS including cafes, the only kind of “cozy” coffee shops I can think of are ones in very small towns with zero competition and extremely low overhead. And you have to be content with just barely surviving as a business.
"But what if you removed all the shitty parts of the job and it was just providing a comfy place to enjoy food and drink with people" what you want is neighbors
Less charitably you can read it the same as the urban version of the people who fantasize about living on a farm, at lot of the time they just don't get how much work it is. There's also just people who dream of it like some dream of being an astronaut or action hero
Even less charitably some probably think about it in a "being king of my little fiefdom" way, like some people fantasize more about owning a plantation than living on a farm
I think this is related to the fantasy from thirty years ago of owning a comic shop. The appeal is not in actually running a small business, which is hard, but in compelling others to pay homage to you if they want to engage with their hobby or interest.
A lot of the Old Shitty Comic/Games Shops of yore were started by people who also, basically, viewed running that business as essentially creating a clubhouse where they could indulge in their hobbies all day as a job. Consequently, a lot of them then invariably went out of business
Back in the brick-and-mortar days, it was a rite of passage to go to a game store and find the owner busy playing 40K or Magic with their friends and them getting annoyed at having to interrupt what they were doing to do things like "answer questions" or "ring customers up"
In an ironic sense, these sorts of hobby stores WERE basically being run by people in a "cozy fiction" sense, as a cool place for their friends to hang out (setting aside how repellent they could be to anyone NOT their friends), and by and large everyone agreed that stores like this sucked shit
Absolutely had one in my town like this. I can still remember the "old paper, stale chips, and body odor" smell permeating all the variant cover X-Men comics and dogeared 2nd edition AD&D sourcebooks.
So this is actually a described phenomenon by Michael Gerber called "the e myth," the idea that being good at something or knowing a lot about something means you should be able to run a business about it! I see this going poorly in the cannabis industry too.
💯
On more than one occasion I literally stood at the counter with a book in hand waiting for someone to show up so I could give the business money in exchange for the product they were selling.
In Cleveland there's a radical social space that offers free coffee, wifi, and vibes every Sunday. People come to browse the library, make some tea, eat some snacks, and just hang out with friends/meet new people. I think that's really what people want.
A cozy fantasy about coffeeshop workers saving up enough money to become adventurers so they could legally kill someone and/or die instead of fantasizing about both every waking hour of the day.
It's funny because we used to have dorks who fantasized about being big muscled adventurers, & now we have dorks who fantasize about being adventurers who fantasize about being dorks.
Maybe they just need to feel happy about their dorkness.
I think there’s also a certain level of owning our work involved in that fantasy. Like I just played tavern simulator and it did remind me of my hectic deli days. But I would also stress I still found it “cozy” because at the end of the game day I could run the place as I saw fit and make a profit/1
I could design and decorate the place how I wanted, and it was effectively my space. Whereas most people don’t even get the hard mode of that fantasy and have to work in someone else’s place and barely scrape by.
I mean if it's your own shop then you are allowed, no? As long as you down do it out of discriminatory reasons ofc — kicking ppl out you who are for example too loud is legal as far as I'm aware
"envisioning a life where I run a 'coffee shop' on main street that inexplicably has very few customers, very expensive coffee, strange only-evening by-appointment hours, and has well dressed well armed people in suits often coming in, never ordering anything, and going into the upstairs room."
the mention of coffee shop AUs reminds me that I'm pretty sure the main inspiration for those was manga, and Japan I'm told actually DOES still have quite a lot of cozy traditional coffee shops. Hell, cozy shops of any stripe. I'm lately constantly jealous of tiny Japanese bars/cafes/restaurants.
It's definitely romanticized, but from my own limited experience, it CAN be one of the more fun manifestations of the food industry. When the fancy espresso machine/"coffee bar" was eliminated from my workplace, most of my limited work enjoyment went with it.
Reminded of that one Japanese convenience store sim with "Talk to your neighbours and learn thier stories" like you've never worked a convenience store. Lemme tell you one the last things you ever want is some guy to tell about his divorce while buying lotto tickets and cigarettes.
when i tell people who never worked food service that working in a bakery was Hell for me, they're always confused. a bakery is this wonderful place to them lol
I think about this every time I consider starting an art store. "Do I actually want to be retail running a store that sells art supplies or do I just want to have loads of supplies all organized 'correctly' and anyone that wants to 'borrow/use' some has to pay for it?"
The store is needed tho👀
Oh yes, nine consecutive f**king hours catering to rich peoples’ fragile egos and smiling politely when they lay into you because the coffee isn’t hot enough, so relaxing
Thinking about the time they guy who was my sibling's boss and owner of the coffee shop and sort of landlord "opened his marriage up" for them and completely fucked everyone's lives up.
Nothing that involves dealing face-to-face with customers is cozy. It's always a fucking nightmare. Also management loving to suck the customer's dick but barely carrying about their employers.
For a while I worked in a little coffee kiosk inside a supermarket. There was actually a nice old couple that I talked to a few times when it wasn't busy that was very friendly, it was nice! Most of the time though it was hell trying to rush to get all the orders while people impatiently waited.
(thinking about the time an elderly man tried to take a drink that wasn't his and when I didn't let go and told him it wasn't his he refused to let go and argued with me that it was until the person who actually ordered it showed up) how cozy!
(remembering the dozenth time someone tried to order a made-up drink from the internet, then when I asked them to explain what's in the drink so I could make it, got mad at me for not knowing) so cozy and relaxing!
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Finland still had some good ones, but here in the states, none of them survived Starbucks and Dutch Bros.
On more than one occasion I literally stood at the counter with a book in hand waiting for someone to show up so I could give the business money in exchange for the product they were selling.
I just wanna live in a commune where I cook for my friends and they’re thankful for it and provide me with books and dice in exchange.
And what if logistics work gets me off?
Maybe they just need to feel happy about their dorkness.
But “there being meaningful friction or struggle that cannot be waved away” is a sin, apparently.
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Ironically it feels like a failure of imagination because there’s a lot of friction that comes from “actually running a business” that …
The store is needed tho👀