Of course, cafés have long served as the locus of business activity for independent consultants, creative types and teleworkers (as well as brewing-places for novels, coups and revolutions). But the new clientèle is different. In contrast to previous recessions, more professionals are out of work. Technology has changed, too, allowing people to job-hunt or devise new business plans untethered from their clunky desk computers and tangled-cord home phones. Moreover, with the number of cafés growing from under 2,000 in 1991 to over 14,000 today, these people now have plenty of places to go.
Their habit may also herald a deeper trend in the workforce: an era of nomadic teleworkers, whose jobs are no longer tied to one particular spot. Quinn Mills, a professor of economics at the Harvard Business School, believes that companies, “with their urge to regiment”, are unprepared for this. Not only the unemployed, but workers too, may prefer to decamp to Starbucks: great for reducing overheads, but perhaps less good for productivity.
For coffee houses themselves, their new status as job centres has helped the industry buck the slumping economy. In 2002, the gourmet-coffee sector earned a record $8.40 billion in revenue, with cafés accounting for more than half the sales. Many coffee houses, belonging both to publicly-traded companies and independent retailers, are reporting sales growth of roughly 7%. And though $4 for a cappuccino may seem steep, it's pretty good for a New York per diem office rent.
On PEI it is the Formosa Tea Room
9:20:38 PM 
|
|
