Solving the Design Puzzle of Coffee Shops
The experience of ordering coffee is 90% a question of design.
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The experience of ordering coffee is 90% a question of design. But most coffee shop owners don’t see it that way.
Think about the last coffee shop you walked into. Did you know where the menu was? Where to stand in line to order? And afterwards, was it clear what you had to do next—where to wait, where the condiment bar was located, how to exit without blocking others as they entered?
I started thinking about these questions after my latest podcast conversation with Nigel Price, owner of Drip Coffee Makers in Brooklyn. Back in the 2010s, Nigel and I orbited around each other, both immersed and employed in the New York coffee scene. During that time, pour-overs became a thing. I distinctly remember the day they were implemented at my very first coffee job. We were excited to have a new toy, a tool that legitimized us, and one that told folks we were a real cafe that took coffee seriously.
And then pour-overs got real annoying, real fast.
I worked at a very busy shop in Times Square, and there wasn’t a ton of space for a dedicated pour-over setup. If someone ordered one, I’d have to stop what I was doing, grab everything I needed—the brewing device, a kettle, a scale, the coffee, etc.—grind the coffee to order, and then sit with the pour-over for at least a few minutes until it finished brewing. At best, this was a mild inconvenience, and at worst, it completely threw off my rhythm, and caused a backlog on drinks as I waited for that one. pour-over. to. finish.
But Nigel pointed out something I hadn’t considered. Were pour-overs annoying, or did we just present them wrong?
Nigel: …a lot of these shops would offer pour-overs, but it was always an afterthought. It was almost one of those things where if you were a barista and you were on bar all day and someone wanted a pour-over, you would immediately get angry because now you have to break your flow to make this pour-over.
That’s when it dawned on me. I was like, “But that’s the best way to have a cup of coffee.” Instead of building a shop around just the espresso machine, you can build a shop around pour-overs where it doesn’t necessarily break the workflow for the barista on bar.
Ashley: You just saying a customer comes in and orders a pour-over harkens in me a feeling that I thought I didn’t have any more, but I’m like, “Oh my God, why’d you order a pour-over???? There are seven people behind you! What’s going on?”
Nigel: Exactly. Another thing is I could easily be that person in line because I just really love pour-overs, but I almost always would never get what I wanted because knowing what that barista’s going through, I just wouldn’t order it. And I was like, “I think it would be cool if I integrated pour-overs into the service.”
Nigel’s vision for Drip Coffee Makers was a cafe that celebrated pour-overs, and he designed his space around that idea. For starters, the pour-overs have their own dedicated setup right in front of the customer, so the barista isn’t turning away to brew the coffee, and can communicate with the guest throughout. Thoughtful adaptations like this help streamline the process, and make brewing pour-overs not only easy, but enjoyable.
Unfortunately, this kind of planning rarely happens in coffee shops, and it requires going beyond just defining a physical layout. Nigel identified a goal early, and based his space, hiring practices, and workflows on that goal.
I think a lot of failures in the coffee industry—and the service industry in general—can be boiled down to a lack of perspective. Did anyone take a step back and ask why a system isn’t working, or why customers are confused by a particular menu item? Many ideas get implemented haphazardly, with the hope that things will just work out. Sometimes they will, but often we attribute failure to the idea itself being bad, or patrons not being ready for that idea, when really we never gave that idea the foundation it needed to succeed.
This goes for management and leadership initiatives, too. Several years ago, the Harvard Business Review published a piece on the corrupting nature of power, aptly called “Don’t Let Power Corrupt You.” In that story, the author asserts that many of the failures of leadership can be attributed to a lack of empathy and perspective. The article gives practical suggestions about how leaders can exercise empathy (“Ask a great question or two in every interaction, and paraphrase important points that others make”) and take themselves out of their own heads and build a more holistic picture of what’s in front of them.
When people go to Drip, they know and expect to wait a few minutes for their pour-over. In the meantime, the space has fostered powerful connections between customers and the baristas behind the bar. That’s because the pour-over stage is like an arena, and the audience is invited to participate and ask questions. This isn’t an accident—before Drip opened a brick-and-mortar space, Nigel had a coffee cart that was essentially a test run of his concept. This idea had been put through the ringer before being fully implemented—and it shows.
Before you go…
I haven’t done one of these roundups in a long time, but my whole social media timeline has been Jeopardy! and that guy who thinks Indian food only has one spice.
In September, the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) plans to host its annual expo—in New Orleans. Slowly, more and more vendors have pulled out of the event, citing poor logistics and the rising rate of COVID-19 infections in the area. Mill City Roasters wrote one of the most detailed breakdowns of why they chose to pull out of the event, sharing information from their conversations with the SCA, personal concerns for their staff and all the ways in which things could go wrong, and local statistics and COVID testing protocols.
The folks of the Colectivo Collective officially won their union vote and are now the largest coffee union in the nation! You can listen to our episode with members of the union here.
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