Hey guys! It's a cafe posting like a person! Yes, we've had operational problems in the last year or two. Well, kind of forever. We're closing not because of poor sales, but because of the necessity of raising a bunch of capital to rebuild the cafe. Probably about $60,000 to $80,000 to do it right, plus we'd have to close for a month or two at least, thus losing about the same amount of money in sales. Getting the capital isn't actually the problem, it's more that, if we spend effectively $100k+, does it make sense to open a coffeeshop again, or are there better things that could be done with that amount of money?
We opened on a real shoestring back when Union had nothing much going on, food-wise or retail-wise, and we had a tiny, hard-to-work in kitchen and a one-customer-at-a-time point of sale.
So it's not really about gentrification, except insofar as people with more money are uptight about hippie-style service. Ahem.