8 ms·

The Turkish Coffee Syndrome

77 points by jcater 13y ago

michaelochurch 13y ago
This isn't a great analogy, because the absence of Turkish coffee isn't a case of malice. They have to degrade service (i.e. take the coffee off the menu) in that way in order to survive. It's not malicious for a business to do things that are slightly shitty but necessary in order to stay alive. On the other hand, there are a lot of cases where bad code and processes are a result of, if rarely malice, intentional and socially negative behaviors (that aren't justified by a need for survival). "Launch and flee" is often intentional.
- breadbox 13y ago
  I think you're taking an overly-narrow definition of "malice". At least in the context of Hanlon's Razor, "malice" typically includes stances that might be more specifically described as "short-term thinking" and/or "apathy". The point is really just to contrast it with "stupidity".
nine_k 13y ago
TL;DR: a Turkish fast food point stopped serving [Turkish] coffee, because coffee drinkers tend to linger, buying only one cup. Business reasons can outweigh technical considerations. Some things are not done not because it's hard to do, but because it does not make business sense. (Thank you, capt'n!)
- mistercow 13y ago
  I'm not sure the dismissal as obvious is warranted. Yes, it's obvious once you break it down into those terms, but you're waving away the part that's not so obvious: that offering a product that's easy to make and patrons want can be economically disadvantageous enough for a business to decide not to offer it. You've filed that under "business reasons", but the specific business reason is the whole point. Still, it seems to me like this shows a severe lack of creativity on the part of the business. A smarter way to do it would be to offer the Turkish coffee alone at an outrageous price that would deter people from ordering it and sitting around. Then you offer a deal where it's reasonably priced if ordered with a meal. That way 90% of the customers you want are happy, and the customers that take up tables for hours go elsewhere.
  - tedunangst 13y ago
    See also: "Please take my money. Why won't you let me give you money for this thing I want you to sell me?" In this instance, I'm not sure raising the price even solves the problem. You'll just get old men ordering meals and pushing the food around their plate for hours.
    - princeb 13y ago
      > I'm not sure raising the price even solves the problem. Priced correctly, it should. if coffee buyers sit around long enough to deny a second ground of customers a table to sit at, the appropriate price for a coffee could be something like, the original price of the coffee + the average amount earned from a single group of customers. for example if the coffee original costs $5, and the typical table holds 2 persons earning you about $7 each, then the appropriate price for a coffee (unbundled) is maybe $19. if someone decides that $20 coffee is worth it, then it makes no difference to you that you sold him the coffee and let him sit around for an hour without another table of customers coming in. if not, he will not be there, and you could now host another table of paying customers.
      - YZF 13y ago
        Some people ordering coffee aren't going to sit around for a lot more. So the nominal cost of coffee would be the price where offering coffee or not offering coffee yield the same profit and we can't really tell where that is. On the other hand, maybe having expensive coffee on the menu will impact other buying decisions people make, it's perfectly possible that coffee at any price will have a negative impact on profit. It's not a simple question of supply and demand because of the mix and crosstalk.
      - mistercow 13y ago
        Well tedunangst's point, which is worth considering, is that the customers who hang around will bypass the whole raised price scheme by ordering an actual meal and getting the discounted price. But that's still avoidable by having the discount structured so that you just can't get a Turkish coffee without paying some minimum amount, determined by trial and error to make it nonviable for retirees to purchase and then sit around all day. With that scheme, however, it becomes more complicated to work out what price makes it worth it for them to actually just sit around, because you also have to factor in the cost of the food they're wasting.
- evincarofautumn 13y ago
  Does an article of only a few hundred words warrant a summary?
  - ams6110 13y ago
    The twitter mentality illustrated.
tareqak 13y ago
I maybe naive, but I see an opportunity for a Turkish coffee stand.
- mirkules 13y ago
  Nobody stands while drinking Turkish coffee. :) But seriously, it's a social drink, which is why it will (or should) never be served in a paper cup. But being originally from a Balkan state myself, I may have a bias against "to go" coffee.
  - bitops 13y ago
    I feel like a real Turkish coffee establishment where you could hang out, chat, and play backgammon could be one of those "slow" things that people like (slow as in slow food). Especially if it was a "no laptops allowed" type of establishment. Just to connect and have real conversations and socialization. This is me at my most idealistic. :)
    - 205guy 13y ago
      No one is arguing that this isn't a good thing. The whole point of the article is that sometimes you cannot have good things. Such an establishment cannot survive (cover costs and liveable wages) in a place with high rent.
    - tareqak 13y ago
      Sounds like a bubble tea store with tables, chairs, board games and maybe a few sofas. (they exist)
keiferski 13y ago
I've recently started making Turkish coffee every morning at home (thanks Turkish GF for introducing it to me!). I like it. It's stronger than regular coffee and you drink it like espresso. The big difference is that you don't strain it through a filter; the grounds end up at the bottom of the cup. The preparation is much more time-consuming than traditional coffee, which I think is the other half of the phenomenon mentioned. You can really only make 4-5 demitasse cups at a time, and it takes 10-15 minutes of actively watching and stirring the cup. Compare this to brew coffee or espresso drinks which take 30 seconds to 2 minutes, tops. So, it's not surprising that Turkish restaurants, whilst adapting to a fast-paced Western capitalist model, lose motivation for going through the whole process.
- Swizec 13y ago
  Why does it take 10-15 minutes to make Turkish coffee? It takes about 2 minutes to make the kind of turkish coffee we drink here in Slovenia ... Unless you're roasting your own beans, but that's supposed to take hours, not 15 minutes.
  - keiferski 13y ago
    The water should be on low-medium heat, which by necessity takes a little while to get to a boil. High heat will get it done in 2 minutes, but the grounds won't mix as well and it sometimes will be burnt-tasting. For reference, here is how I was taught to make it: 1. Put water in cezve equal to number of cups you'd like 2. Put cezve on stove at low-medium heat 3. Add in one teaspoon of coffee per cup 4. Add in sugar (if desired) 5. Keep on low heat until foam and small bubbles appear. 6. Pour a little bit of coffee into each cup, then return to heat. Repeat 2-3x until cups are full. 7. Let each cup sit for a minute to let the grounds settle. 8. Enjoy!
    - dsego 13y ago
      A more practical way is to wait for the water to boil, then pour out some of the water into a cup (which you will put back afterwards). This way there is more room for the coffee to rise and not overflow. Then put coffee in and bring to boil several times. The surface should rise but not separate. Some people even remove the foam altogether to remove the bitterness.
Emass12 13y ago
Problem could be easily solved by simply requiring a meal order for coffee, although perhaps they were afraid they'd anger the other patrons. Still, margins on coffee can be quite high.
- markhelo 13y ago
  Or just offering coffee before or at the end of each meal. Factor the price in your menu for large entrees. People like free stuff.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
lmm 13y ago
But that's not the reason. The most frustrating part of bad code isn't that it's bad, it's that writing better code pays off even in the short term. Tests often earn their keep before you've even finished the feature they're testing, as do more basic things like sensible variable names. We're not talking about pragmatic sacrifices for business reasons; that can lead to well-written code that doesn't scale or makes dubious assumptions about its data. But plain unreadable code is never the result of anything except ignorance.
- koenigdavidmj 13y ago
  I think you commented on the wrong article.
  - yetanotherphd 13y ago
    no, the analogy just went way over your head EDIT: On re-reading I have no idea if that post was actually directed at this article or not. I was just making the joke because it looks like any post about code might be a metaphor for any article if you think hard enough.
guard-of-terra 13y ago
Where I live this problem is solved by raising prices, so you can't find coffee for less than 5$ in busy places. But if for some reason business is averse to raising prices, weird schemes materialize.
- maxk42 13y ago
  Where I live there are groups of old men who come to the coffee shops in the evenings and buy one cup of coffee, then sit around bullshitting and playing cards for hours. If this business is facing a similar problem, then raising the price of a cup of coffee to $5 simply won't cut it. Then again -- I know a lot of businesses despise these customers, but these are the guys who will be there night after night, rain or shine. Your typical customer comes by how often? Once every month or two? It's worthwhile to put up with them if they're not causing you to lose other business.
  - dmckeon 13y ago
    Opportunity - segment the market: keep restaurant as is, organize a self-supporting social club for the coffee drinkers & card players nearby, upstairs, or next door, serve coffee, take-out pastries, etc. to club-goers. Details, regulations, ymmv.
yetanotherphd 13y ago
They should just rent out table space per minute independently of the cost of meal itself.
- lsc 13y ago
  sort of the 'internet cafe' model with refreshments. If you wanted to go for the 'uber' crowd, you could adjust your prices based on demand. I don't know about the adjusting price on demand (there is a lot of advantage to fixed and predictable prices) but I do think it is a model that could possibly work. Without demand pricing, you would also need some hook to 'bootstrap' I mean, you aren't going to pay money to go hang out in an empty building - maybe good free coffee? that would be a cheap hook that would work, at least for me. This would also likely work in a place where there aren't good regular coffee houses. I imagine a 'pay by the hour' place would have a hard time existing next to, say, red rock in mountain view. The other problem I see is actually collecting the money; if you charge people per-drink, they pay you when they get another drink. If you charge per hour, you've gotta have someone monitoring, or hand out hardware that tracks the customer. I do like the model, though. You can emphasize the social, you know, like a nightclub, only with the more intellectual connotations of the cafe.
  - yetanotherphd 13y ago
    my comment wasn't 100% serious, more poking fun at my disciplines tendency to advocate "markets for everything". However maybe it won't be too long before all kinds of social venues don't charge by the hour. It seems like even the low tech solution of time limits is not viable for these places, so they resort to the simpler solution of taking coffee off the menu.
johnrob 13y ago
Corollary: Beware of unintended business ramifications when doing a code rewrite (i.e. putting coffee back on the menu might cause revenue per table to drop).
gkya 13y ago
Usually, after a cup of Turkish coffee, follows a session of "coffee fortune-telling"[0]. The residuum of coffee in the cup is reviewed to make estimations on the future. Living in Istanbul, Turkey, I've seen and heard of a lot of places that make a business out of coffee fortune-telling. Maybe this would help shopkeepers abroad gain some income from Turkish coffee and not stop serving it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasseography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasseography -- Also referred to as "coffee reading". edit: added wikipedia page.
tlb 13y ago
A/B testing would have gotten the same result, if they'd optimized revenue/table across menu variations. In fact, A/B testing on websites does frequently enhance dark patterns.
purplelobster 13y ago
When I was showing my wife around Stockholm, it started pouring down, and we quickly went into a small coffee shop on a touristy street. I tried to buy a coffee ($5 mind you) and they wouldn't let me. Not without buying something else as well. Now I can understand that it makes economical sense for them, since they had few seats and it was a busy location, but that experience was just hugely off-putting to me. I will never go back there. I call it... the Stockholm Syndrome.
- trcollinson 13y ago
  I see what you did there ;)
farseer 13y ago
They could have raised the price of coffee instead of eliminating it.
- ape4 13y ago
  I was about to post the same. Maybe $25.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
ballard 13y ago
To be extra literal: Café 220 220 Univ Ave, Palo Alto Has Turkish coffee and you won't be rushed out the door. Also usually comps tea if you order something for dine-in. Veggie mousaka and falafel wraps FTW. (Gotta plug my friends, after all.)
busterarm 13y ago
I like this fix. People don't realize that loitering in restaurants (particularly by teenagers and retirees) is a huge problem and reduces business. Restaurants frequently lobby together to get loitering laws passed to deal with it. I used to live in a neighborhood with an abundance of retirement homes and a dearth of restaurants. The two that were open and had decent hours were _always_ filled with old people sitting for hours talking and reading the paper. Often they were borderline-homeless/smelly and they would get into fights. It was incredibly frustrating to want to get food and not have a place to sit. Because this restaurant was part of a chain and had policies to follow, there wasn't really anything they could do to alleviate the situation. My only option to eat was basically to take the subway out of the neighborhood or walk significantly out of my way. I don't think any business should be forced to serve customers that are a drain on their revenue. Other options like selectively serving coffee could trigger a costly discrimination suit. tl;dr: old, table-bogarting assholes are ruining delicious Turkish coffee for everyone and there isn't really anything that can be done about it.
- yetanotherphd 13y ago
  It seems that what they need isn't new laws, but removal of whatever law prevents them from putting time limits on their tables. But maybe what prevents them from doing this is a very general law that they need a special exception from, and hence a "loitering law".
  - thaumasiotes 13y ago
    Your parent comment specifically says this: > Because this restaurant was part of a chain and had policies to follow, there wasn't really anything they could do to alleviate the situation. So it seems the situation is something like "a McDonald's franchise owner has a big problem with oldsters filling his seats and inhibiting revenue. As a condition of the McDonald's franchise, he's not allowed to kick patrons out, because though that's great for his revenue the PR is bad enough that it's a revenue loss for headquarters. So he lobbies the local government, which doesn't oversee McDonald's-the-international-company, to pass loitering laws such that he's able to get rid of the oldsters." I don't think the hypothetical guy would have much luck making the case to the IP holder that he needs to build some ill will for the brand.
mattmaroon 13y ago
If I were them I'd just raise the prices. Or pull it off the menu until the old folks migrated then put it back. Or just serve it to people who are eating and ask for it specifically. There are at least 10 solutions that don't leave money on the table.
- sopooneo 13y ago
  I agree with every point you make. But I bet reality has counters for them all. In line with the author, I've found that inexplicable behavior may result from stupidity or ignorance, but much more often there is something you don't know.
  - mattmaroon 13y ago
    You might be right. I'm not 100% sure what the solution is. But I am sure it's not telling someone "no I won't sell you the high markup item you want".
- MBlume 13y ago
  I bet having coffee on the menu for some exorbitant price would piss people off more than its apparently inexplicable absence
Poiesis 13y ago
Charge rent. Serve free coffee.
- eru 13y ago
  Like a co-working space?
bsullivan01 13y ago
Turks do love their coffee, it's their second religion :-) You can buy the wares http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_coffee http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_coffee in ethnic stores, Turkish, Middle Eastern or even Eastern European stores (many were occupied by the Turks for quite a few centuries.) As for coffee, just ask a good online store to grind it at #0 for Turkish style. Grinders at supermarket do not work as well. The coffee loses its freshness a bit so the first few days but it's still very good. Most Turkish coffee drinkers are either from Turkey, Middle east or Eastern /Southern Europe, or people that generally speaking do take their time so I understand why restaurants are pissed at them.
MrKurtHaeusler 13y ago
I thought restaurants make more money from drinks (and deserts) than actual meals.
- chillax 13y ago
  Probably, but if someone sits at a table for hours and only buys one cup over all those hours other sales will most likely be lost if the place is full of those 1-cupers.
obilgic 13y ago
one simply does not drink turkish coffee at fast food place.
litmus 13y ago
Frankly these types of places have all of my understanding but none of my respect. Outside of Turkey the coffee would probably be part of the core allure of a Turkish restaurant. The irony being that coffee and tea are often complimentary after meals at many restaurants in Turkey. Its sort of a betrayal when the social aspect is supposed to be part of the package given that people in Turkey spend long hours at the dinner table, talking. Is there a legal issue that prevents them from only serving coffee with a meal? And then the thought that old folks spend part of their day walking around trying to figure out where they can sit down and talk is all kind of depressing. This seems like a poor fix, but hey, talk is cheap.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

77 points by jcater 13y ago

This isn't a great analogy, because the absence of Turkish coffee isn't a case of malice. They have to degrade service (i.e. take the coffee off the menu) in that way in order to survive. It's not malicious for a business to do things that are slightly shitty but necessary in order to stay alive. On the other hand, there are a lot of cases where bad code and processes are a result of, if rarely malice, intentional and socially negative behaviors (that aren't justified by a need for survival). "Launch and flee" is often intentional.

breadbox 13y ago
I think you're taking an overly-narrow definition of "malice". At least in the context of Hanlon's Razor, "malice" typically includes stances that might be more specifically described as "short-term thinking" and/or "apathy". The point is really just to contrast it with "stupidity".

nine_k 13y ago

TL;DR: a Turkish fast food point stopped serving [Turkish] coffee, because coffee drinkers tend to linger, buying only one cup. Business reasons can outweigh technical considerations. Some things are not done not because it's hard to do, but because it does not make business sense. (Thank you, capt'n!)

mistercow 13y ago
I'm not sure the dismissal as obvious is warranted. Yes, it's obvious once you break it down into those terms, but you're waving away the part that's not so obvious: that offering a product that's easy to make and patrons want can be economically disadvantageous enough for a business to decide not to offer it. You've filed that under "business reasons", but the specific business reason is the whole point. Still, it seems to me like this shows a severe lack of creativity on the part of the business. A smarter way to do it would be to offer the Turkish coffee alone at an outrageous price that would deter people from ordering it and sitting around. Then you offer a deal where it's reasonably priced if ordered with a meal. That way 90% of the customers you want are happy, and the customers that take up tables for hours go elsewhere.
- tedunangst 13y ago
  See also: "Please take my money. Why won't you let me give you money for this thing I want you to sell me?" In this instance, I'm not sure raising the price even solves the problem. You'll just get old men ordering meals and pushing the food around their plate for hours.
  - princeb 13y ago
    > I'm not sure raising the price even solves the problem. Priced correctly, it should. if coffee buyers sit around long enough to deny a second ground of customers a table to sit at, the appropriate price for a coffee could be something like, the original price of the coffee + the average amount earned from a single group of customers. for example if the coffee original costs $5, and the typical table holds 2 persons earning you about $7 each, then the appropriate price for a coffee (unbundled) is maybe $19. if someone decides that $20 coffee is worth it, then it makes no difference to you that you sold him the coffee and let him sit around for an hour without another table of customers coming in. if not, he will not be there, and you could now host another table of paying customers.
    - YZF 13y ago
      Some people ordering coffee aren't going to sit around for a lot more. So the nominal cost of coffee would be the price where offering coffee or not offering coffee yield the same profit and we can't really tell where that is. On the other hand, maybe having expensive coffee on the menu will impact other buying decisions people make, it's perfectly possible that coffee at any price will have a negative impact on profit. It's not a simple question of supply and demand because of the mix and crosstalk.
    - mistercow 13y ago
      Well tedunangst's point, which is worth considering, is that the customers who hang around will bypass the whole raised price scheme by ordering an actual meal and getting the discounted price. But that's still avoidable by having the discount structured so that you just can't get a Turkish coffee without paying some minimum amount, determined by trial and error to make it nonviable for retirees to purchase and then sit around all day. With that scheme, however, it becomes more complicated to work out what price makes it worth it for them to actually just sit around, because you also have to factor in the cost of the food they're wasting.
evincarofautumn 13y ago
Does an article of only a few hundred words warrant a summary?
- ams6110 13y ago
  The twitter mentality illustrated.

tareqak 13y ago

I maybe naive, but I see an opportunity for a Turkish coffee stand.

mirkules 13y ago
Nobody stands while drinking Turkish coffee. :) But seriously, it's a social drink, which is why it will (or should) never be served in a paper cup. But being originally from a Balkan state myself, I may have a bias against "to go" coffee.
- bitops 13y ago
  I feel like a real Turkish coffee establishment where you could hang out, chat, and play backgammon could be one of those "slow" things that people like (slow as in slow food). Especially if it was a "no laptops allowed" type of establishment. Just to connect and have real conversations and socialization. This is me at my most idealistic. :)
  - 205guy 13y ago
    No one is arguing that this isn't a good thing. The whole point of the article is that sometimes you cannot have good things. Such an establishment cannot survive (cover costs and liveable wages) in a place with high rent.
  - tareqak 13y ago
    Sounds like a bubble tea store with tables, chairs, board games and maybe a few sofas. (they exist)

keiferski 13y ago

I've recently started making Turkish coffee every morning at home (thanks Turkish GF for introducing it to me!). I like it. It's stronger than regular coffee and you drink it like espresso. The big difference is that you don't strain it through a filter; the grounds end up at the bottom of the cup. The preparation is much more time-consuming than traditional coffee, which I think is the other half of the phenomenon mentioned. You can really only make 4-5 demitasse cups at a time, and it takes 10-15 minutes of actively watching and stirring the cup. Compare this to brew coffee or espresso drinks which take 30 seconds to 2 minutes, tops. So, it's not surprising that Turkish restaurants, whilst adapting to a fast-paced Western capitalist model, lose motivation for going through the whole process.

Swizec 13y ago
Why does it take 10-15 minutes to make Turkish coffee? It takes about 2 minutes to make the kind of turkish coffee we drink here in Slovenia ... Unless you're roasting your own beans, but that's supposed to take hours, not 15 minutes.
- keiferski 13y ago
  The water should be on low-medium heat, which by necessity takes a little while to get to a boil. High heat will get it done in 2 minutes, but the grounds won't mix as well and it sometimes will be burnt-tasting. For reference, here is how I was taught to make it: 1. Put water in cezve equal to number of cups you'd like 2. Put cezve on stove at low-medium heat 3. Add in one teaspoon of coffee per cup 4. Add in sugar (if desired) 5. Keep on low heat until foam and small bubbles appear. 6. Pour a little bit of coffee into each cup, then return to heat. Repeat 2-3x until cups are full. 7. Let each cup sit for a minute to let the grounds settle. 8. Enjoy!
  - dsego 13y ago
    A more practical way is to wait for the water to boil, then pour out some of the water into a cup (which you will put back afterwards). This way there is more room for the coffee to rise and not overflow. Then put coffee in and bring to boil several times. The surface should rise but not separate. Some people even remove the foam altogether to remove the bitterness.

Emass12 13y ago

Problem could be easily solved by simply requiring a meal order for coffee, although perhaps they were afraid they'd anger the other patrons. Still, margins on coffee can be quite high.

markhelo 13y ago
Or just offering coffee before or at the end of each meal. Factor the price in your menu for large entrees. People like free stuff.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

lmm 13y ago

But that's not the reason. The most frustrating part of bad code isn't that it's bad, it's that writing better code pays off even in the short term. Tests often earn their keep before you've even finished the feature they're testing, as do more basic things like sensible variable names. We're not talking about pragmatic sacrifices for business reasons; that can lead to well-written code that doesn't scale or makes dubious assumptions about its data. But plain unreadable code is never the result of anything except ignorance.

koenigdavidmj 13y ago
I think you commented on the wrong article.
- yetanotherphd 13y ago
  no, the analogy just went way over your head EDIT: On re-reading I have no idea if that post was actually directed at this article or not. I was just making the joke because it looks like any post about code might be a metaphor for any article if you think hard enough.

guard-of-terra 13y ago

Where I live this problem is solved by raising prices, so you can't find coffee for less than 5$ in busy places. But if for some reason business is averse to raising prices, weird schemes materialize.

maxk42 13y ago
Where I live there are groups of old men who come to the coffee shops in the evenings and buy one cup of coffee, then sit around bullshitting and playing cards for hours. If this business is facing a similar problem, then raising the price of a cup of coffee to $5 simply won't cut it. Then again -- I know a lot of businesses despise these customers, but these are the guys who will be there night after night, rain or shine. Your typical customer comes by how often? Once every month or two? It's worthwhile to put up with them if they're not causing you to lose other business.
- dmckeon 13y ago
  Opportunity - segment the market: keep restaurant as is, organize a self-supporting social club for the coffee drinkers & card players nearby, upstairs, or next door, serve coffee, take-out pastries, etc. to club-goers. Details, regulations, ymmv.

yetanotherphd 13y ago

They should just rent out table space per minute independently of the cost of meal itself.

lsc 13y ago
sort of the 'internet cafe' model with refreshments. If you wanted to go for the 'uber' crowd, you could adjust your prices based on demand. I don't know about the adjusting price on demand (there is a lot of advantage to fixed and predictable prices) but I do think it is a model that could possibly work. Without demand pricing, you would also need some hook to 'bootstrap' I mean, you aren't going to pay money to go hang out in an empty building - maybe good free coffee? that would be a cheap hook that would work, at least for me. This would also likely work in a place where there aren't good regular coffee houses. I imagine a 'pay by the hour' place would have a hard time existing next to, say, red rock in mountain view. The other problem I see is actually collecting the money; if you charge people per-drink, they pay you when they get another drink. If you charge per hour, you've gotta have someone monitoring, or hand out hardware that tracks the customer. I do like the model, though. You can emphasize the social, you know, like a nightclub, only with the more intellectual connotations of the cafe.
- yetanotherphd 13y ago
  my comment wasn't 100% serious, more poking fun at my disciplines tendency to advocate "markets for everything". However maybe it won't be too long before all kinds of social venues don't charge by the hour. It seems like even the low tech solution of time limits is not viable for these places, so they resort to the simpler solution of taking coffee off the menu.

johnrob 13y ago

Corollary: Beware of unintended business ramifications when doing a code rewrite (i.e. putting coffee back on the menu might cause revenue per table to drop).

gkya 13y ago

Usually, after a cup of Turkish coffee, follows a session of "coffee fortune-telling"[0]. The residuum of coffee in the cup is reviewed to make estimations on the future. Living in Istanbul, Turkey, I've seen and heard of a lot of places that make a business out of coffee fortune-telling. Maybe this would help shopkeepers abroad gain some income from Turkish coffee and not stop serving it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasseography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasseography -- Also referred to as "coffee reading". edit: added wikipedia page.

tlb 13y ago

A/B testing would have gotten the same result, if they'd optimized revenue/table across menu variations. In fact, A/B testing on websites does frequently enhance dark patterns.

purplelobster 13y ago

When I was showing my wife around Stockholm, it started pouring down, and we quickly went into a small coffee shop on a touristy street. I tried to buy a coffee ($5 mind you) and they wouldn't let me. Not without buying something else as well. Now I can understand that it makes economical sense for them, since they had few seats and it was a busy location, but that experience was just hugely off-putting to me. I will never go back there. I call it... the Stockholm Syndrome.

trcollinson 13y ago
I see what you did there ;)

farseer 13y ago

They could have raised the price of coffee instead of eliminating it.

ape4 13y ago
I was about to post the same. Maybe $25.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

ballard 13y ago

To be extra literal: Café 220 220 Univ Ave, Palo Alto Has Turkish coffee and you won't be rushed out the door. Also usually comps tea if you order something for dine-in. Veggie mousaka and falafel wraps FTW. (Gotta plug my friends, after all.)

busterarm 13y ago

I like this fix. People don't realize that loitering in restaurants (particularly by teenagers and retirees) is a huge problem and reduces business. Restaurants frequently lobby together to get loitering laws passed to deal with it. I used to live in a neighborhood with an abundance of retirement homes and a dearth of restaurants. The two that were open and had decent hours were _always_ filled with old people sitting for hours talking and reading the paper. Often they were borderline-homeless/smelly and they would get into fights. It was incredibly frustrating to want to get food and not have a place to sit. Because this restaurant was part of a chain and had policies to follow, there wasn't really anything they could do to alleviate the situation. My only option to eat was basically to take the subway out of the neighborhood or walk significantly out of my way. I don't think any business should be forced to serve customers that are a drain on their revenue. Other options like selectively serving coffee could trigger a costly discrimination suit. tl;dr: old, table-bogarting assholes are ruining delicious Turkish coffee for everyone and there isn't really anything that can be done about it.

yetanotherphd 13y ago
It seems that what they need isn't new laws, but removal of whatever law prevents them from putting time limits on their tables. But maybe what prevents them from doing this is a very general law that they need a special exception from, and hence a "loitering law".
- thaumasiotes 13y ago
  Your parent comment specifically says this: > Because this restaurant was part of a chain and had policies to follow, there wasn't really anything they could do to alleviate the situation. So it seems the situation is something like "a McDonald's franchise owner has a big problem with oldsters filling his seats and inhibiting revenue. As a condition of the McDonald's franchise, he's not allowed to kick patrons out, because though that's great for his revenue the PR is bad enough that it's a revenue loss for headquarters. So he lobbies the local government, which doesn't oversee McDonald's-the-international-company, to pass loitering laws such that he's able to get rid of the oldsters." I don't think the hypothetical guy would have much luck making the case to the IP holder that he needs to build some ill will for the brand.

mattmaroon 13y ago

If I were them I'd just raise the prices. Or pull it off the menu until the old folks migrated then put it back. Or just serve it to people who are eating and ask for it specifically. There are at least 10 solutions that don't leave money on the table.

sopooneo 13y ago
I agree with every point you make. But I bet reality has counters for them all. In line with the author, I've found that inexplicable behavior may result from stupidity or ignorance, but much more often there is something you don't know.
- mattmaroon 13y ago
  You might be right. I'm not 100% sure what the solution is. But I am sure it's not telling someone "no I won't sell you the high markup item you want".
MBlume 13y ago
I bet having coffee on the menu for some exorbitant price would piss people off more than its apparently inexplicable absence

Poiesis 13y ago

Charge rent. Serve free coffee.

eru 13y ago
Like a co-working space?

bsullivan01 13y ago

Turks do love their coffee, it's their second religion :-) You can buy the wares http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_coffee http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_coffee in ethnic stores, Turkish, Middle Eastern or even Eastern European stores (many were occupied by the Turks for quite a few centuries.) As for coffee, just ask a good online store to grind it at #0 for Turkish style. Grinders at supermarket do not work as well. The coffee loses its freshness a bit so the first few days but it's still very good. Most Turkish coffee drinkers are either from Turkey, Middle east or Eastern /Southern Europe, or people that generally speaking do take their time so I understand why restaurants are pissed at them.

MrKurtHaeusler 13y ago

I thought restaurants make more money from drinks (and deserts) than actual meals.

chillax 13y ago
Probably, but if someone sits at a table for hours and only buys one cup over all those hours other sales will most likely be lost if the place is full of those 1-cupers.

obilgic 13y ago

one simply does not drink turkish coffee at fast food place.

litmus 13y ago

Frankly these types of places have all of my understanding but none of my respect. Outside of Turkey the coffee would probably be part of the core allure of a Turkish restaurant. The irony being that coffee and tea are often complimentary after meals at many restaurants in Turkey. Its sort of a betrayal when the social aspect is supposed to be part of the package given that people in Turkey spend long hours at the dinner table, talking. Is there a legal issue that prevents them from only serving coffee with a meal? And then the thought that old folks spend part of their day walking around trying to figure out where they can sit down and talk is all kind of depressing. This seems like a poor fix, but hey, talk is cheap.

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