An Irishman’s Diary about a tale of two cafés

The relentless march of the Insomnia café chain finally reached my neighbourhood this week. And as a regular in several of the company’s city-centre outlets, I should have been among the first customers in the new one too.

It has, after all, many of the things I like in a coffee house, including a corner location, fast wifi, and a reasonably good carrot cake.

Soft furnishings

It’s also spacious, with two separate entrances – always useful if you need to avoid somebody.

It has the now de rigueur soft furnishings too. And there’s even a bookshelf.

But none of this matters, because I can’t use it, at least for now. The problem is, it opened next door to an existing café where I’ve also been a regular, and where my face – maybe even my name – is known.

Moreover, the existing café is a one-off, independent business, which was probably battling the odds even before this challenge.

So despite the new place’s attractions, for the foreseeable future, I can’t darken either of its doors.

It’s not that the existing café is ideal, by any means. It lacks a corner site, for one thing. It’s a bit square too.

The room could do with a large plant or miniature tree in the middle, to break the space up.

Also, last time I checked, the business had neither wifi nor a recognisable form of carrot cake.

It can feel a bit small too, especially when other customers are having loud conversations of the kind on which you don’t want to eavesdrop.

Executives from nearby offices are the worst. Recently I heard two men exchanging such phrases as “person-oriented”, “customer experience”, and other things people don’t say in real-life.

I assumed it was a job interview, which is not the sort of thing you want to be involved in when you’re just trying to read the newspaper.

Regular customer

But none of that matters either. The fact remains that I’m regular customer. I have identified with the struggles of the owners (Polish, I think). I am, in short, an emotional shareholder in the café. If it goes out of business anytime soon, I don’t want it to be on my conscience.

Mind you, the signs so far are that it’s fighting its corner. Until this week, for example, the café had mostly hard seats – stylish but functional.

Then, lo, the day the other place opened, most of the hard seats were replaced by new upholstered ones, in various colours.

You sink into them now and, ironically, I am not enjoying this improvement. I like to spread my newspaper flat on the table and then look down on it from an angle of 45 degrees or greater. But with the new soft seats, I find myself about six inches lower, vis a vis the table’s horizon, than I want to be.

So my customer experience has actually disimproved because of the competition. I may now have to start bringing cushions.

An even bigger irony, by the way, is that this café is one of the few businesses I frequent these days never to have asked me if I want a loyalty card. I don’t want one, as it happens. But everyone else is offering cards now – you acquire them the way a ship does barnacles.

As with many things, you don’t like to say a simple “no” when asked.

So for a while, I was in the habit of protesting that my wallet was full of cards and I had no more room.

Then they started to go virtual – you just had to download a phone app – so I had to think up other excuses, such as the fact that life was complicated enough already, and that I only came in for a coffee, not a long-term relationship, but thanks anyway.

Loyalty

And yet here I am, tying myself to the mast of a business that hasn’t even officially enlisted me to the crew. It’s a funny thing, loyalty.

Anyway, my hope is that there’s enough room for both businesses. That’s what Starbucks always says when accused of squeezing out independents – that far from reducing the number of cafés in an area, their outlets tend to multiply them by increasing the overall market. Maybe that will happen in our neighbourhood too.

Here’s one way it might work. I’ll probably be tempted to use the new place, eventually. But if the older one is still around by then, I’ll solve the loyalty problem by increasing my caffeine intake to the tune of 100 per cent. Then I’ll become a regular in both.

@FrankmcnallyIT