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tl;dr summary: Thanks to Coffee Cultures, which is closing today.

During the pandemic, I walked. First with our then-infant strapped to my chest. Then as he outgrew "nap-nap walks," I walked Alameda Island while chatting on the phone with coworkers.

I learned random street names (although city staff still know more than I do; pop quiz: Tynan Street is probably the most important road relative to its length in all of Alameda — know where it is?)

As the modern miracle of mRNA-based vaccines began to return life to normal for those of us who had been fortunate to not work on the front lines and I continued to walk, one of the patterns I started to notice was coffee shops. Not only the existing cafes reopening but also new entries: Signal on Webster, Lazybird on Central, a Starbucks on Bay Farm (thanks but no thanks), Highwire near the foot of Park (in the most Japanese of looking little buildings), Coffee Cultures at the top of Park (more on Coffee Cultures in a moment), Island Savoy Market with an espresso bar on Lincoln. (I once made a map of all of them, which I can't find on my mess of a computer.)

Alameda's appetite for a place to drink a $5 - $8 coffee, while sitting in a lively place seemed insatiable. My guess is that the trend has been assisted by more FAANG PMs (and similarly [over]paid professionals) working from home rather than going for full days into downtown SF or Menlo Park or Sunnyvale or wherever. Instead they/we have found an hour sitting in a local coffee shop to be a great way to get out of one's "Zoom room" at home. (Also a healthy number of parents with babies and friends with flexible schedules catching up in the mid-morning, too.)

And yet Alamedans' appetite has bounds. Almost no coffee shop currently appears able to justify a second shift. As a younger person, I spent a ton of evenings hanging around cafes and Borders bookstores... but these days it doesn't seem like many of those businesses can earn enough to operate past ~4 p.m.

Coffee Cultures

As the pandemic ebbed, my Bay Area colleagues and I got back into working in-person (with Meet/Slack/Teams/Zoom for remote colleagues and clients; if absolutely required, I will use my phone to dial into WebEx calls in order to never have to install that awful piece of software!) We leased an office immediately next to one of those new coffee shops — Coffee Cultures. It was quite familiar, given that I had also worked near one of their San Francisco locations pre-pandemic.

My coworkers fill up every day they come into the office. I'm cheap and try not to buy coffee out that often. I save my mental budget for when I have guests or clients over, and it's great to be able to walk right next door and meet over a fancy coffee.

But the food-service business sounds brutal. Leases and labor and supplies are all apparently quite expensive — and all rising. Coffee Cultures has also been robbed twice at night (the same guy broke the front windows and entered to empty the cash register and take a single beer) and during the day (with a different dude walking away with the tip jar). The owner of Coffee Cultures has sold the business and a new cafe will take its place tomorrow.

We bought a few of their branded mugs to retain in our office. Thanks to Jason and team for the coffee and being a good neighbor!

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For an old but still informative read see Slate's classic "Bitter Brew: I opened a charming neighborhood coffee shop. Then it destroyed my life." The author also wrote a fictionalized book-length version of his failed cafe experience that I once enjoyed reading called Ground Up.

Pastries

Ones Cafe & Bakery, a cafe based in Castro Valley, is taking over Coffee Cultures' storefront.

Sounds like they'll be selling pastries prepared by Bake Sum — a New York Times approved East Bay bakery that is about to open a production space in the Alameda Marketplace spot formerly occupied by Feel Good Bakery.

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Feel Good Bakery's other production location on Encinal has now been taken over by Alameda's homegrown Night Heron Bread.

Will it be good or bad for many fancy pastries to be available feet from my office? Let's just say that I got more exercise taking all those "nap-nap walks" with my son and "walk-and-talks" on the phone than I currently do, so maybe not a pastry every day.

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In Coffee Cultures' initial days in Alameda, they often over-ordered pastries, and would come over to offer us the day's leftovers. It felt like returning to the world of grad school, where the pay was poor, the caste system was rigid, but the food was free!

But how do they make it work?

I genuinely don't know how entrepreneurs do what they do in the food-service business. Some of these businesses must be taking on massive amounts of debt in order to open multiple locations. Oakland's Red Bay Coffee is one recent cautionary example of growing too big too quickly. I can only wonder how an aspiring little chain like Signal or Bake Sum can cover the expenses of expanding while also managing their labor and supply costs.

Even a top restaurant in the country, Fikscue BBQ on Park, is only open one evening and two weekend days. Despite all their press, they apparently aren't able to make the dollars and cents work to open a full-service sit-down restaurant.

The food-service industry has probably always relied on underpaid labor in both the front of house and in kitchens — and especially relied on unpaid labor from family members. In the Bay Area it's supercharged and almost broken.

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Back when I lived in a house/warehouse in Berkeley, I randomly found a zine at an indie bookstore for my wage-paid housemates titled Abolish Restaurants: A Worker's Critique of the Food Service Industry (which I was just able to find again with a Google search).

Those of us fortunate enough to afford to live comfortably here and to Zoom/Meet/Slack/Teams/WebEx/BlueJeans/blah/blah/blah into our desk jobs (or in my case to walk/bike to a nearby office) depend upon food-service business-owners balancing their books and food-service workers covering their own rent or mortgage (and every other expense).

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One of my friends who is a professional baker in San Francisco owns his own condo thanks to inclusionary zoning, so yes, food-service workers can have mortgages.

Of all the reasons to build more multifamily housing across the Bay Area, this is one of the more tangible: to lower the cost of living and to add sufficient customers nearby of all ages to enable coffee shops to not just serve a morning rush but to also pay a swing shift to stay open late into the evenings.