Il 2025 sarà l’anno più difficile per i caffè. Il mio stipendio è di due terzi l’importo che mi è stato pagato nel mio precedente lavoro paye
https://www.irishtimes.com/food/restaurants/2025/03/08/2025-is-going-to-be-the-hardest-year-yet-for-cafes-my-salary-is-two-thirds-the-amount-i-was-paid-in-my-previous-paye-job/
di FearTeas
37 commenti
I can’t stand these people. They talk about the VAT increase as the 9% rate wasn’t always advertised as temporary.
The reason why cafés and restaurants are closing is because of reduced demand. Not because of a reversion to the usual VAT rate and not because the minimum wage went up by a few cent. VAT and minimum wage reductions also won’t address the underlying demand issue. In fact, suppressing wages is only going to contribute to the overall demand issue.
If your business can’t survive without emergency tax cuts and properly compensating your employees then your business is just not successful.
If the government wants to actually help these businesses they need to help with the slump in demand by working to make housing and energy more affordable in a sustainable manner (that doesn’t just rely on subsidies funded by windfall taxes).
>With that logic, why don’t we take on France’s higher tax rate, or Italy’s average industrial wage, which is far lower than our own?
How did the Irish Times let that be posted? The government can’t just decide to introduce Italy’s industrial wage ffs 🤦♂️
All the business heads forgetting approximately 20% of new businesses fail during the first two years of being open, 45% during the first five years, and 65% during the first 10 years.
Rent is the same if your business is running 8 outs a day or 24 hours ,. Most cafes only run from morning to lunch , which limits your ability to make money , business owner need to figure out ways for that business to be making profit for more hours , whether it’s renting out the kitchen at night or figuring out other lines of business. The day of small family run business is over , it’s about how much you can borrow and expand in a short period of time and then sell the business empire to some investment fund
If cafe owners think they have it bad now, over the next 12 months coffee inputs will double/triple in price due to the impacts of climate change on crop yields. It’s already started happening.
There’s damn all who will pay 8-9 euro for a watery Americano
Even before the pandemic it was a running joke that coffee shops would pop up and shut down within a few months and that there was one around every corner.
The market is completely over saturated and has been for decades.
More tax cuts wont fix the core problem of too much supply, not enough demand.
Add on top inflation. People aint going to be coming in for a 5 euro latte.
We’re oversaturated with bog standard cafés selling freezer pastries and coffee vans/carts pouring burnt piss. Some of them need to go.
Failed business model in a declining economy. I have sympathy but I’ve had enough of the idea of socialised losses in Ireland, the SME sector whinge had always been too powerful in this country
I think a huge part of the problem is how Ireland defines “cafe culture”.
As anyone over 35 knows, the very idea of a cafe is relatively new for Ireland. We’ve gone from having essentially zero cafe culture for centuries (with the exception of tea rooms) to adopting some weird version of West-Coast American/Australian culture wholesale with a completely crazy number of outlets.
Most of these outlets are premised around being high-cost, aspirational, Instagrammy joints. And yes, the inputs/costs are high bla bla bla but they’re aspirationally expensive on a *branding* level.
Instead of slavishly copying the worst aspects of Anglosphere cafe culture for 30 years, we *could* have copied Continental cafe culture. And thereby enjoyed what should be affordable, high-quality staples for a reasonable price in pleasant local environments.
A cafe local to me charges €4.70 for a pastry. They’re exquisite, and while I couldn’t afford to be going there all the time, I did like to go in once a week as a treat on my way to work. It’d be €9.10 for a coffee and pastry.
Over time I stopped getting the coffee, they had 3 baristas, and two of them made noticeably worse coffees than the third. So I started just getting a pastry and bringing my usual thermos of coffee from home.
Then, I started noticing that they’d sell day-old pastries. I can justify €4.70 a week for a delicious mixed berry & pistachio croissant, but I can’t justify a coin flip between that and one that feels like biting into a dry weetabix.
I can sympathise with them, times are tough and nobody opens a cafe thinking they’ll get rich off it, but if you can’t keep up with staff training and quality control, sympathy is all I can give you, because I can’t give you my money.
Demand has plummeted for cafes/restaurants. Too expensive for me
Local coffee shops, pubs,restaurants etc. are important. There’s so many new estates going up, and there’s nothing in the neighbourhood. No pub, no coffee shop, nothing. Of course there’s probably an empty shopfront which was required for planning, but no-one can afford to rent it. There’s fortunes being poured into libraries and “community centres” which sit idle most of the time, or at best host poetry readings on a Tuesday. We’ll happily spend a few million on an “interpretive centre” telling you the history of a rock, but someplace to sit down with friends and have a coffee or a cake is seen as a waste of money. The 5-minute neighbourhoods are in reality the 30 minute drive to a garden centre.
I’d like to see them get some help. Not the Costas or the Starbucks, the local businesses.
Last time I went to Costa and asked for oat milk. They charged me 90 cent extra. Total was about €5.10.
Rarely go for a coffee because of the cost.
Coffee seemed to go from €2 across the board to €3 and beyond overnight,then the cafes sprung up everywhere and the prices increased again.Its a luxury purchase no matter how you look at it and when people tighten the purse it’s an easy saving to cut out so yeah loads of them will die off and hopefully the prices comes down a small bit
People finally deciding to give up the lattes and avacado toast and save some money.
A lot of people in here seem to hafe a fairly negative view of a coffee shop (which is surprising, to be honest). Probably it’s the rising prices. Or maybe it’s the association with city yuppies or something.
But personally, I can’t think of a single more important “local/community business” than the nearest cafe/coffee shop. Traditionally in Ireland it was pub, post office and shop that made up the absolute lynchpins of the local village.
… but people hardly use a post office (despite the 112 diffence services they’re expected to run these days). And the pubs been in decline for decades and conflating pints with socialising obviously has had some serious social drawbacks for us as a country.
So what does that leave us? What’s the social heart of a village? (If it had one, and wasn’t just dying, of course…). Has to be the local cafe right?
Maybe the local GAA club? But I don’t think it fills the same social niche.
Maybe that’ll sound naive to some people who only have “strictly business” money grabbing fuckers for cafes near you. But my local area all love our local cafe, and it was a huge deal when the ownership changed recently. We’d be heartbroken if it ever completely closed down.
> …as the Government drags its feet on this issue?
Government shouldn’t be bailing out every failed business model. If there are 20 coffee shops in an area and you can’t make money opening a 21st, that’s a you problem, not a taxpayer problem.
Paid like 4 euro for a simple Americano, no sugar, no milk, just hot water and coffee. Then the person at the till had the cheek to spin the screen around and ask for a tip. I obviously clicked no and won’t be going back to that cafe and don’t feel sorry for cafés like that that close up.
I’ve never drank a cup of coffee in my life. But in my opinion, the country is saturated with little cafe’s that are focused on coffee.
If more people worked in the office they would probably have more customers. Remote working is killing a lot of small businesses.
At €10 for a simple sandwich, how the fuck are they not raking in the money?
It’s a perfect storm. Incomes become more squeezed due to inflation, cafe’s are under pressure from price inflation. This coupled with a lot of bad underlying businesses is creating the perfect storm. It’s sadly not the states responsibility to bail out businesses where the underlying business is flaky
There’s too many cafes, many of which are selling overpriced piss. It’s hard for any business to survive when you sell a luxury item not a necessity especially when it’s over priced and in a saturated market. People will cut out their €5 take away coffee before most things when looking to save money. Businesses fail all the time. We can bail them all out.
There is too much tax on small businesses like this. They are a service as much as a business. The government is directly responsible for the highest energy and insurance costs in the EU.
Too many cafes peddling too much overpriced cat piss and overpriced baked goods.A lot of them could do with going under.
Salaries, rent, utilities, supplies and VAT have all increased in cost. I would hate to be running a cafe or restaurant in this environment.
I have stopped buying my morning coffee these days, and I am far less inclined to buy any convenience food over cooking myself.
I really feel for these small businesses. Despite what people believe, a lot of these places operate on very small margins.
As an individual, there is a lot to be said for working for someone else and getting your wage at the end of the month.
But as a society, we need small businesses to be able to thrive.
To quote the accidental economist “if you can’t make money on that margin, you can’t make money”
Got charged €8.75 for a flat white and an americano the other day. Unsustainable. I’ll stick to my Tassimo at home, works out less than 50c a cup
I bet she wasn’t moaning about the cost of employee wages when she was the PAYE employee earning 33% more than she is now.
I’ve zero sympathy for people who moan about minimum wage increases.
I’m seeing good publicity for Jackie’s and Pyg doing 5e pints, city centre operations. I would guess that margins are thin or the intention is running the competition into the ground.
Either way, beverage operators made hay when the sun shone. Those late the game inevitably don’t have dry powder – as someone said above, if your the 21st cafe, why should you expect to be equally profitable
As for declining demand, supply and demand is an L shaped graph and coffee isn’t inelastic. Higher prices = less demand. Which goes back to my original point.
I bought 700 euro coffee machine at home, makes lovely freshly ground coffee, with organic milk .. saved me a fortune on take away coffee. Also I know its cleaned, many of those coffee places barely clean their coffee machine. Nowadays if I do get coffee out, its never as good as the one I make at home ..
Cafes are stupid. Pubs need to be charging the same for pints as Lidl. We should eliminate duty for alcohol in pubs.
Unpopular opinion:
There’s too many coffee shops, and gyms.
The threshold to set something up isn’t that high. And just cos you can doesn’t mean you have the skills to make it a viable biz.
Cutting out coffee and bringing in your own lunch saves so much money, if you have to tighten your belt, and many do, that’s the first step I would take. I can’t see that many being open this time next year.
Im used to , and ok with , the 3-3.70e for a flat white in most local , non chain affiliated cafes. I went into Insomnia Mullingar recently because it was convenient to do so (I usually avoid chains). I got charged 4.60 for a coffee. NEVER again. The unfortunate thing is these identikit shitholes will remain while a lot of good independent cafes won’t
I make coffee at home
There are simply too many cafes.
In my village alone there are 10 cafes within a 200 metre radius, it’s madness.
I buy nespresso pods and have a milk frother. Haven’t paid for a coffee in years.
We could do with 50 percent of coffee shops closing. Seriously some people want an easy life.