Brewing Up Buzz: Do Retail Cafes Really Pay Off?

Just around the corner from its flagship on Paris’ Champs Élysées, Lacoste, the tennis-led brand that has a crocodile-logoed polo shirt at its core, has a new café, imaginatively dubbed Café Lacoste.

Opened at the beginning of February it features, as might be expected, a lot of tennis memorabilia from yesteryear, principally in the shape of wooden rackets and it is the combination of items bearing the brand signature combined with a generally dark wood interior that is supposed to attract customers.

This may work and just like other of its ilk, from Ralph Lauren to Louis Vuitton, this seems increasingly to be part of the offer of every big brand or retailer worth its salt. On the face of it, it makes sense. Choosing to have a café as part of, say, a flagship, means waving the hospitality flag at shoppers and offering them a short break from inspecting an offer, before resuming the shopping mission.

Equally, for standalone cafes and restaurants bearing a well-known brand name (and this can be an upscale or mid-market retailer – the same rule applies), there is the possibility of sampling a label’s implied ambiance without having to dig deep. For the price of a shot of caffeine (albeit usually somewhat more expensive than a workaday coffee shop) consumers can trip the branded light fantastic.

The question that underpins all of this is whether money is being made, or is it all a bit of a “we have it too” component of a modern store or brand? There is no ready answer to this as operating a café in a swanky department store on a major shopping thoroughfare is a different matter from putting an eatery on the top floor of a value-led store. In the latter case, a café may well be a paying proposition, rents will be cheaper. But further up the value scale it’s a fine balance between space, price and return when it comes to opening a café.

Yet shoppers now expect this and for retailers for whom it is a marginal part of an offer, it may be a case of biting the bullet and serving up the mint tea, almond milk latte or black Americano, whatever the economics. Suck it up.