The Coffeeshop Fallacy (2011)
A few years ago I was staying at an AirBnB in Carlsbad&#x2F;Oceanside. I wandered down to a little coffee shack&#x2F;breakfast place across the street from the beach. As I sat out front, enjoying my cup of coffee, I thought, &quot;this is exactly what I want to do with my retirement... I want to buy this shack and pay some 17 to 20 year olds to make people coffee and pancakes&quot;. While that sounded great in my vacationing mindset, the reality is far more soul-crushing. Upon returning home I started doing some back of the napkin math on what it&#x27;d actually take to run a place like that. 3 or 4 employees at $20 an hour (this is California), plus insurance, plus... well all the other stuff it takes to employ a human. That&#x27;s before I even consider food and supplies. Coffee at 2 dollars a cup, pancakes at 8 dollars a plate. Could we sell enough even to make payroll? Forget any profit.<p>I believe this is why we&#x27;re seeing the sunset on the little mom-n-pop businesses. There&#x27;s no way these folks can pay living wages. Now if this were Reddit I&#x27;d be angrily shouted down and told, &quot;then they deserve to be out of business!&quot;. Fine, let&#x27;s put all those evil family-run donut shops out of business. But let&#x27;s not complain that we only have even more evil McDonalds-style franchises that own everything.<p>All this to say, I wish there were some middle ground. The truth is, I&#x27;ll probably have to figure out how to like Starbucks.