Number of the Day
The Unlikely Resilience of Coffee Shops, by the Numbers
Cafés are struggling, but they’re doing better than restaurants
129: That’s how many New York City coffee shops (out of a total of 3,890) have permanently shut down since March, according to data from Yelp, per the Wall Street Journal. Prior to the pandemic, the Journal notes that the number of coffee shops in the city increased by 29% over three years, an average of more than five new cafés a week.
The pandemic put a stop to that trend, but it appears that cafés are hanging on better than restaurants have. As we noted in a Marker Number of the Day last month, nearly 16,000 restaurants across the country have permanently shut down since March. (In New York City, the number of closed restaurants is estimated to be close to 1,000, according to Eater NY.)
Steve LeVine argued on Marker yesterday that some coffee shops are a part of the trillion-dollar economy built to serve the commuting white-collar office worker, which is at risk of collapsing if workers don’t return to the office soon (case in point: in its recent earnings call, Starbucks attributed the loss of some $2 billion year on year to deserted urban office corridors). And Max Ufberg wrote in GEN last month that cafés have lost their cultural…
