Part of being an American means that you are always on the lookout for entrepreneurship opportunities even if you’re a risk-averse coward like I am.
Every now and again I come up with some business venture that somebody else should totally pursue. I say that I totally would if I had the money and some guts.
As often as not, these turn out to be a bad idea.
The most recent one is looking at the absolute lack of coffeehouses here in western Queenland. The county where I lived in Arapaho (Dent County) had 9,000 or so people and the town I lived in said county (Callie) had roughly half of that. The next largest town had less than three hundred people. The rest was rurally aportioned in the county. Callie had two coffeehouses, one coffee hut, and a Starbucks in the Safeway.
Lancaster County, where I presently live, has 50,000 people in it. Roughly 10,000 people live in the city of Stonebridge or its Kingsland counterpart, Southbridge. Given the coffee situation in Callie, you could imagine my surprise on our arrival when I discover that Stonebridge has… two coffee places, plus coffee at a bread and sandwich chain. Oh, and a Dunkin Donuts, of that counts. No Starbucks at all. No drive-thru huts. No drive-thru at all! And one of the two coffee places is five-minutes out of town and another has a rotten parking situation because it’s right downtown.
It seemed to me that this place was ripe for a new coffee place. If I had the money, I’d open one. Heck, I’d call it Hit Coffee! Surely this place is dying for more coffee-related options!
Evidently not. One of the two coffee places closed last month. And apparently there used to be a third, which closed before we got here. So now there’s only one.
One of my favorite coffee places of anywhere I lived was called Bad Ass Coffee (before it de-franchised). I even bought a t-shirt, in part because I liked the place and part because it had good t-shirts with its donkey mascots. Anyhow, imagine my surprise when I arrive out here and discover that the downtown coffee place (the one that just closed). I mean, a table with the Bad Ass logo on it. I asked them if they used to be a Bad Ass Coffee and they said that they bought the table at an auction.
If I were to open a coffee place, if it weren’t Hit Coffee, it would be Bad Ass Coffee. Because who doesn’t want to try coffee at a place called Bad Ass Coffee?
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Oh, and a Dunkin Donuts, of that counts. No Starbucks at all. No drive-thru huts. No drive-thru at all
FWIW, if you guys have a Dunkin Donuts and McDonalds, then your coffee needs are pretty much met. I suspect that your locale just doesn’t have the base that’s willing to pay for bourgeois coffee, so those two will have to do until a certain regional convenience store expands.
No Starbucks at all
Starbucks tends to be sparse in exurban/rural areas around here too, especially off the beaten path where the money isn’t sloshing around.
FWIW, I think Callie’s location outside of the Pacific Northwest may explain some cultural influences from the Zaulem Sound area, hence the coffee culture.
Dunkin Donuts coffee is remarkably mediocre. Given what I’d heard about them – they’re the blue collar equivalent of Starbucks – I’d expected better. McDonald’s is okay.
You may be right about the east-west thing. I’d still expect better from here if only because I am in the outer rungs of a major metropolitan area while then I was in the middle of nowhere.
Every now and again I come up with some business venture that somebody else should totally pursue. I say that I totally would if I had the money and some guts.
Heh, me, too. I’ve got a bunch of them.
As often as not, these turn out to be a bad idea.
Mine, too, probably. But I proudly (and sadly) note that my brother and I came up with the idea for a hand-held personal battery-operated fan in 1974 while roasting in the gym at our other brother’s high school graduation ceremony. Unfortunately we were young and mechanically (as well as entrepreneurially) moronic. But I still remember the day in the late ’80s when I first saw our invention, the now ubiquitous foam-bladed, pocket-sized, battery operated personal fan, for sale in a store. I must have stared, thunderstruck, for 5 minutes. And then I realized how much money we didn’t make because we didn’t think about the fact that our cousin-in-law was a guy who could have easily prototyped one for us–and a guy who was looking for an idea that would make him a millionaire by age 35–and I nearly cried.
Those things still piss me off.
What drives me crazy is the tech boom and the huge launches I saw coming. I knew well ahead of time that AMD was going to be huge. Their processors were beating Intel’s at half the price.
Today, of course, I would say “Quality and price don’t matter. Intel has a lock on the processor market and it doesn’t matter how good AMD is.”
But back then I was all “Intel is in some deep crap!”
I would be wrong now. I was right then. If only I’d put my money where my mouth was.
(I’m going to pretend that there isn’t a 99% chance here that I am counting the hits and forgetting the misses.)
Whenever I used to get Starbucks, I was surprised that it always tasted like it was old, really old, like, twelve hours old. But I guess that’s just the bitterness of it. I like DD a lot better.
As for inventions, I don’t know why no one makes a safer double-barrel shotgun. Something with a Glock-like action. Hell, put two more barrels on it, and you’ve got something.