It is not enough to just serve coffee, so they threw in some cats and plenty of peanuts!

by Chee Leng
(Singapore)

I have touched on this topic many times, the coffee shop business while lucrative, is very competitive -you can probably call it cut -throat.

Even Starbucks are feeling the heat by closing outlets and focusing on their service standards. Then again, Starbucks is big, they get to buy their products cheaper and their distribution is huge, plus the fact that they are cash rich.

so what if you are not Starbucks? How do you survive and make some money?

Cafes in Korea have some very innovative ideas. First, they have this cat cafe, where customers come in to get a coffee and play with the cats.

The success of this cafe is probably due to the ladies dragging their boyfriends with them as they come in to play with the cats.

Even the owner acknowledged that the reason for their success is not so much about their coffee, but the cats.

Then, there is this Charlie Brown cafe that featured Peanuts characters, such as Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Woodstock etc.

The owner claimed that this is one and only cafe that is peanuts themed, and fans of the comic strips gets to admired hundreds of Peanuts character as they sipped the coffee.

Other themed cafe are:

cafes where you get to play with dogs

Cafes where the kids are being taken care of

Cafes where there are hundreds of board games for you to play.

The list goes on, but you got to give it to the Koreans for taking risk and being so innovative.

I for one, would never think that simply by putting in a few cats would make you sell more coffee!