Why Authentic Coffee Shops Fail

All coffee is equal, but some is more equal than others.

Living in small-town Ohio, I'll occasionally see new coffee shops crop up. Their unique selling point is simple: their coffee is real. It's not weighed down by the sugars and syrups and burned beans of Starbucks.

And inevitably, these shops end up subsisting—rarely thriving—for a few years at best until the shop shutters and is turned into a vape store.

Just as Ben Shapiro calls himself an expert in music because his dad went to music school, I consider myself an expert in the economics of coffee shops because my wife managed one for a while. So, it is with this formidable expertise backing me that I make this assertion:

These "authentic" coffee shops are a result of poor product-market fit.

You see, the customers in Ohio who want good coffee are not looking for “authentic” (whatever that actually means) coffee. So, these shops must surrender to the customers that the Midwest yields if they wish to survive.

Portrait of a lady on fire in scrubs

There's a highly specific archetype of person that frequents these coffee shops. I call this archetype Bethany the healthcare administrator.

Bethany is a White, overmedicated single mom to Braylin and Hunter, ages 11 and 8, who lives and works in the town she was born in. She wears her hair pulled back into a tight bun, follicles of the hairline visibly strained, and she won't leave the house without her eyeliner fastidiously applied. She works some sort of administrative role at the local hospital alongside her two best friends to whom she is fiercely loyal: a woman with dyed pink braids and a more androgynous woman with a penchant for combat boots. They have known each other since high school, where they ran in different circles until their crossed paths at the hospital outpatient desk Breakfast-Clubbed them into friendship by proximity. Bethany has no qualms having a verbal throwdown with a particularly rude or skeevy patron. She knows they can't fire her lest her department falls apart and upper management must, God forbid, interact with the general public.

On their breaks, Bethany and her friends stand outside. Bethany chews gum (she gave up smoking), and they say things like, "This place ain't what it used to be," and "Maybe I'll go back to school."

Bethany takes one vacation a year, and that's to go to King's Island with her kids. When the sporadic child support from her baby daddy Cooper (currently an over-the-road trucker) actually comes in and her budget has some extra breathing room, Bethany likes to treat herself to a weekend at a casino outside of Muncie, Indiana with "her girls" (the aforementioned coworkers).

Bethany drives a certified pre-owned white Volvo, but what she really wants is a Jeep of some fluorescent tone—hence the casino trips.

And finally, Bethany loves coffee. She loves to get her girls coffee en route to her 8 to 5 (1 hour paid break—a benefit she does not take for granted) at St. Isaac's Hospital System, Ottawa Branch. She does so every day. The act has transcended routine and become a life-affirming ritual.

Her order is the same each time: a 24-ounce iced caramel latte (coat the sides of the cup with caramel, please), two extra shots of espresso, and whipped cream. Her friend with pink braids takes the same. The combat-booted friend takes it black, not because she likes it, but because she has a statement to make.

Bethany is content. She works hard. And she is a good person.

It is the Bethanys of the world who keep our society running. And we do them—and by extension, ourselves—a massive disservice when we turn our candy-coffeed houses of delight into "authentic" coffee depots, which are really just wannabe speakeasies for bearded, emotionally disturbed guys who wear flannel shirts and Chelsea boots and name their kids after jazz trumpeters. (It takes an insidious kind of psychological complex to look at your beautiful newborn and say, "Yeah, I think we'll call him Hoagy.") These people have no investment in the community; they want to twist the local culture into some sick imitation of 1960s Greenwich Village.

If a Midwest coffee shop wishes to succeed, financially and morally, it should—it must—cater to Bethany.