No plugs at Joyce - for real???

spinningpinwheel

I'm recently unemployed, and easily distracted at home, so I had planned to set up shop at the beloved Joyce for researching and resume-sending during the day. All set to get down to business, I bought my tea & scone, asked for the free wifi password, opened up my laptop, and looked around for a plug. When I noticed that the nearest plug was marked 'Do Not Use', I inquired at the counter, only to be cheerfully informed that Joyce 'does not supply electricity.'

What?

For real?

So, they offer free wifi, but you're only welcome to stay for the duration of your laptop battery? Is this to cut down on loiterers? Cause on a Tuesday early afternoon, they didn't seem to have a space issue. In fact, by the time I left (15 minutes later), all the other laptop people in the place had cleared out as well, and every single seat was empty.

I imagine they have a reason behind this, but they've just lost out on my multiple snack/multiple drink cash during a slow time of the day.

Does this seem like an odd choice to anyone else?

candicissima

Sadly, I've got to say I can't blame them. Nothing's less welcoming for a random consumer than every table filled up with people camping out on their laptops (if space was an issue). Maybe they assumed laptop people are deadbeats who wouldn't buy anything either.

emily

I'm not surprised. During my summer quarter I was going over there a lot (only for an hour at a time, just for variety's sake) and you couldn't find a seat due to all the laptop workers. There was one guy who would sit there for hours, in the nicest seat by the window, with headphones on. Um, it's a cafe, not a sensory deprivation tank.

Anyway, I can see why they did it, but since my laptop is ancient and has zero battery power, I now can't work there at all.

erikka

This is a surprize given the general attitude of the place? I'm surprized she supplies tables.

mateo

erikka wrote: This is a surprize given the general attitude of the place? I'm surprized she supplies tables.

Huh? Everyone at Joyce's is always very sweet when I stop in.

doublediamond

erikka wrote: This is a surprize given the general attitude of the place? I'm surprized she supplies tables.

Aside from the fact that people are paying Joyce's rent whenever they buy a tiny $2.50 croissant (no folks, I'm still not over that and never will be), the workers are incredibly nice. What do you mean?

ltjbukem

solution: buy an extra laptop battery. and after that, if you're hanging out in a bakery for 4+ hours, then think of someting better to do.

spinningpinwheel

emily wrote: Anyway, I can see why they did it, but since my laptop is ancient and has zero battery power, I now can't work there at all.

Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I can understand the need to deter laptop campers, but still seems odd to me, as they don't even offer Wifi on weekends - I asked. So that leaves Tues-Fri as the only days that laptops would camp out there, and really, how much of a space problem can that be? I would think feeding someone's $3.50 latte habit multiple times would make up for it.

ltjbukem wrote: solution: buy an extra laptop battery. and after that, if you're hanging out in a bakery for 4+ hours, then think of someting better to do.

Its not worth it for me to buy an extra laptop battery when, sadly, I can just go to Starbucks.

And I sure will think of something better to do than job search... when I find a new job.

emily

My laptop is ancient so it's just not worth it to me to pay for a third $100 battery for it when I could just buy chai mix at TJ's, make it myself, and work at home on the desktop which is much newer and more powerful anyway.

But maybe I'll try to get my knitting group to meet me at Joyce, something we'd given up on before because we couldn't get seats near the window.

erikka

Oops, sorry, I confused it with Muddy Waters. My bad, brain was checked out for the day yesterday. Yes, they are nice--and I am surprized but can understand their position.

mateo

This past article from Slate may be instructive.

http://www.slate.com/id/2132576/

You know that charming little cafe on New York's Lower East Side that just closed after a mere six months in business—where coffee was served on silver trays with a glass of water and a little chocolate cookie? The one that, as you calmly and correctly observed, was doomed from its inception because it was too precious and too offbeat? The one you still kind of fell for, the way one falls for a tubercular maiden? Yeah, that one was mine.

The scary part is that you think you can do better.

I never realized how ubiquitous the dream of opening a small coffeehouse was until I fell under its spell myself. Friends' eyes misted over when my wife and I would excitedly recite our concept ("Vienna roast from Vienna! It's lighter and sweeter than bitter Italian espresso—no need to drown it in milk!"). It seemed that just about every boho-professional couple had indulged in this fantasy at some point or another.

The dream of running a small cafe has nothing to do with the excitement of entrepreneurship or the joys of being one's own boss—none of us would ever consider opening a Laundromat or a stationery store, and even the most delusional can see that an independent bookshop is a bad idea these days. The small cafe connects to the fantasy of throwing a perpetual dinner party, and it cuts deeper—all the way to Barbie tea sets—than any other capitalist urge. To a couple in the throes of the cafe dream, money is almost an afterthought. Which is good, because they're going to lose a lot of it.

The failure of a small cafe is not a question of competence. It is a sad given. The logistics of a food establishment that seats between 20 and 25 people (which roughly corresponds to the definition of "cozy") are such that the place will stay afloat—barely—as long as its owners spend all of their time on the job. There is a golden rule, long cherished by restaurateurs, for determining whether a business is viable. Rent should take up no more than 25 percent of your revenue, another 25 percent should go toward payroll, and 35 percent should go toward the product. The remaining 15 percent is what you take home. There's an even more elegant version of that rule: Make your rent in four days to be profitable, a week to break even. If you haven't hit the latter mark in a month, close.

A place that seats 25 will have to employ at least two people for every shift: someone to work the front and someone for the kitchen (assuming you find a guy who will both uncomplainingly wash dishes and reliably whip up pretty crepes; if you've found that guy, you're already in better shape than most NYC restaurateurs. You're also, most likely, already in trouble with immigration services). Budgeting $15 for the payroll for every hour your charming cafe is open (let's say 10 hours a day) relieves you of $4,500 a month. That gives you another $4,500 a month for rent and $6,300 to stock up on product. It also means that to come up with the total needed $18K of revenue per month, you will need to sell that product at an average of a 300 percent markup.

Pastries, for instance, are a monetary black hole unless you bake them yourself. We started out by engaging a pedigreed gentleman baker with Le Bernardin on his résumé. Hercule, as I'll call him, embodied every French stereotype in existence: He was jovial, enthusiastic, rude, snooty, manic-depressive, brilliant, and utterly unreliable. His croissants were buttery, flaky, not too big, and $1.25 wholesale. We sold them for $2 and threw away roughly 50 percent—in other words, we were making a negative quarter on each croissant. After a couple of months of this, we downgraded to a more Americanized version of the croissant (vast and pillowy). The new croissants ran 90 cents each and made us feel vaguely dirty. We sold them for the same $2. Ironically, their elephantine size meant that every time someone ordered a croissant with cheese, we had to load it up with twice as much Gruyère.

Coffee was a different story—thanks to the trail blazed by Starbucks, the world of coffee retail is now a rogue's playground of jaw-dropping markups. An espresso that required about 18 cents worth of beans (and we used very good beans) was sold for $2.50 with nary an eyebrow raised on either side of the counter. A dab of milk froth or a splash of hot water transformed the drink into a macchiato or an Americano, respectively, and raised the price to $3. The house brew too cold to be sold for $1 a cup was chilled further and reborn at $2.50 a cup as iced coffee, a drink whose appeal I do not even pretend to grasp.

But how much of it could we sell? Discarding food as a self-canceling expense at best, the coffee needed to account for all of our profit. We needed to sell roughly $500 of it a day. This kind of money is only achievable through solid foot traffic, but, of course, our cafe was too cozy and charming to pop in for a cup to go. The average coffee-to-stay customer nursed his mocha (i.e., his $5 ticket) for upward of 30 minutes. Don't get me started on people with laptops.

There was, of course, one way to make the cafe viable: It was written into the Golden Rule itself. My wife Lily and I could work there, full-time, save on the payroll, and gerrymander the rest of the budget to allow for lower sales. Guess what, dear dreamers? The psychological gap between working in a cafe because it's fun and romantic and doing the exact same thing because you have to is enormous. Within weeks, Lily and I—previously ensconced in an enviably stress-free marriage—were at each other's throats. I hesitate to say which was worse: working the same shift or alternating. Each option presented its own small tortures. Two highly educated professionals with artistic aspirations have just put themselves—or, as we saw it, each other—on $8-per-hour jobs slinging coffee. After four more months, we grew suspicious of each other's motives, obsessively kept track of each other's contributions to the cause ("You worked three days last week!"), and generally waltzed on the edge of divorce. The marriage appears to have been saved by a well-timed bankruptcy.

Looking back, we (incredibly) should have heeded the advice of bad-boy chef Anthony Bourdain, who wrote our epitaph in Kitchen Confidential: "The most dangerous species of owner ... is the one who gets into the business for love."

robdesign13

Nice article. Thanks. Coming from a family of resteraunt owners, I can fully empithise. Both of my parents have worked there together for 28 years (still), with me and my little sis helping out at least 2x a week when we were younger.

It's got to be hard to open any place on Vanderbilt considering all the real estate doesn't lend much room to create anything of a decent size that can be productive. Plus foot traffic isn't nearly as heavy as flatbush. (trains?) Look at Soda, even he had to double the size to make a buck.

At first I was like, this lady sucks. She's super cheap, short with customers and now she's witholding electricity???! But maybe we have all become too expectant of services to know the reasons behind. Or maybe she's cheap and she sucks? :?

germfree!

How did people get any of their 'work' done before cafes with wifi? How much expenditure, per hour, do you think justifies use of a table?

Regardless, as a customer, I find the experience of walking into an establishment full of plugged-in people extremely unpleasant. I'd much rather see a gang of knitters. Or even strollers.

I think the no outlet idea is a rather clever means of limiting those table-colonising laptoppy folk.

putz

doublediamond wrote: Aside from the fact that people are paying Joyce's rent whenever they buy a tiny $2.50 croissant (no folks, I'm still not over that and never will be), the workers are incredibly nice. What do you mean?

agreed, price to size ratio of the criossants is outrageous! blue sky is a much better deal. lets organize a rally for reasonably priced croissants on vanderbilt! croissants for the working man!!!

and it is hard to imagine that joyce is not doing quite good business.

veggiequeen

germfree! wrote: Regardless, as a customer, I find the experience of walking into an establishment full of plugged-in people extremely unpleasant.

I feel exactly the same way... like I just walked into someone's home or office and am disturbing them. Not like I should care...

There are so many people these days that exist in their own little reality in public... headphones on, face in front of a screen (laptop, handheld game, etc). I miss the 'interaction', even if it's not verbal.

doublediamond

putz wrote: [quote=doublediamond]Aside from the fact that people are paying Joyce's rent whenever they buy a tiny $2.50 croissant (no folks, I'm still not over that and never will be), the workers are incredibly nice. What do you mean?

agreed, price to size ratio of the criossants is outrageous! blue sky is a much better deal. lets organize a rally for reasonably priced croissants on vanderbilt! croissants for the working man!!!

and it is hard to imagine that joyce is not doing quite good business.

Now that I read that coffee article posted above, I have more sympathy for what she as an owner has to go through. I still won't pay $2.50 for a croissant, though, but I do get my coffee there.

I love Blue Sky's muffins. Their croissants aren't that great though. I solved my croissant issues by ordering the frozen dough from Williams-Sonoma. It's fantastic, and if you're a croissant lover, I totally recommend it.

doublediamond

VeggieQueen wrote: [quote=germfree!]Regardless, as a customer, I find the experience of walking into an establishment full of plugged-in people extremely unpleasant.

I feel exactly the same way... like I just walked into someone's home or office and am disturbing them. Not like I should care...

There are so many people these days that exist in their own little reality in public... headphones on, face in front of a screen (laptop, handheld game, etc). I miss the 'interaction', even if it's not verbal.

Agreed. This actually makes me want to go to Joyce more. I can't count how many times I've pinballed from coffee shop to coffee shop, including Joyce, looking for one that I could actually sit down and read the paper with my coffee. I've completely given up.

germfree!

I think Blue Sky does NOT have wifi. We should compile a list.

sje

Excellent article. However, no-one mentioned the COST of electricity if you have a commercial account. More than residential, lots more, because supposedly, you're making oh so much money you can afford to pay Con Ed more for the exact same service. Having to pay for 20-25 peoples internet habit for many hours every day will sink a small ship like Joyce.

I don't mind paying whatever she asks for her pastries, because to me, they're gourmet quality, not the same old crap. I don't eat it every day, either, it's a few times a week treat. I think she's an inspired baker and a tremendous asset to Vanderbilt.

sprite

sje wrote: I don't mind paying whatever she asks for her pastries, because to me, they're gourmet quality, not the same old crap. I don't eat it every day, either, it's a few times a week treat. I think she's an inspired baker and a tremendous asset to Vanderbilt.

I concur. The croissants are expensive for their size, but they are soooo worth it. True, I couldn't afford to get one every day - but neither can my waistline.

spinningpinwheel

Ok I accept that my complaints are fueled by selfish sugar addiction. I just wanted to guiltlessly hole up there while unemployed! I just wanted to have banana bread pudding and carrot bread within arm's reach for hours at a time!

I guess I'll have to walk the two blocks instead. I still love you, Joyce Bakeshop!