Empty Cup: How Small Coffee Shops are Drying Up

The Great Recession affected America in big ways - changing our jobs, our houses, our cars. Now its impact is spreading in more subtle ways, with one American symbol that's right under our noses.

Shifts in national markets have dripped all the way down to our coffee cups, with the demise of the local coffee shop.

Widespread impact

One small coffee shop, Super Cup in Morton Grove, is hanging on. Owner Bill Wegner said the recession has made the business, which was already tough to make profitable, nearly impossible.

“I’m part of a dying breed,” Wegner said.

The value of coffee houses to communities goes beyond a tasty brew, according to Wegner. They are places for people to congregate. Everyone from sanitation workers and librarians to unemployed people and the mayor visit  weekly.

“If you want to know what’s going on in this town, you can come here,” Wegner said.

Morton Grovers can also go to on Dempster Street or on Dempster Street for their coffee fix.

In nearby Des Plaines, several small coffee houses have opened and closed in the last few years. The last one to close, Sweet Remembrance Café on Lee Street, was open until about the middle of 2010.

In addition to changes in where people drink coffee, recent years have brought changes to what types of coffee they drink, according to Joseph Derupo, director of communications for the National Coffee Association, an industry-wide trade association based in New York.

The association conducts annual studies that track coffee-drinking habits. The amount of people that drink coffee out of the home went from 36 percent in 2008 to 30 percent in 2010.

At the same time, Derupo said more people are drinking gourmet coffee as opposed to the traditional type. Grocery stores currently offer more gourmet brands than ever before.

Recession misconception

Although fewer people are going out for coffee, more people are drinking gourmet. However, people’s perception of their coffee-drinking habits seems to be unaffected by the recession.

Derupo said 84 percent of respondents said their coffee consumption was unaffected by the recession in 2010.

Whether we realize it or not, what we drink and where we drink it has changed--and it’s not just small coffee houses that have gone dark.

Flower Art Studio, 1519 Market St., at Metropolitan Square in downtown Des Plaines, is surrounded by empty retail space. Within a one square block around the business in the southeast corner of the development, roughly half of the storefronts are vacant.

Owner Krystyna Swiderski said she likes the spot because there are some anchor stores and decent foot traffic but she hasn’t seen any new businesses come in around her since she opened a year ago. At the same time, the expenses associated with running her small business have not changed either.

“You have to sell a lot of roses to pay your rent,” Swiderski said.

Downtowns today

The Village of Morton Grove hired Community and Economic Development Director John Said in the spring of 2010. Said has worked on business development around the local Metra station and deals with local restaurants such as Crazy Jaws and Culver's.

At the end of 2010, nearby Des Plaines hired its own new Director of Community and Economic Development, Michael Bartholomew, and eliminated the previous community and economic development coordinator position.

Bartholomew said because he has only recently started working here, he did not have Des Plaines’ retail vacancy rate available. However, he said there’s tremendous potential in Des Plaines because of the population density.

“For any successful business, whether it’s a coffee shop or a dry cleaner or whatever it is, a key to that is the people that frequent the businesses,” Bartholomew said. “And we seem to have the main ingredient here.”