48 Opinion
Enough with the Coffee Shops Already! Coffee Shop Overkill Reaches Epidemic Levels in Bongseon-dong OPINION
Written by William Urbanski
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www.gwangjunewsgic.com
September 2020
o you like a nice warm cup of coffee? Yes? Me, too. Do you need one after every fifty meters you walk? If so, then you should come to Bongseondong where on a single five-hundred-meter stretch of road there are no less than ten coffee shops. This is not including a certain side street where there are four coffee shops back-to-back-to-back-to-back. I think I speak for all of humanity when I say enough is enough of these coffee shops already. The coffee shops in question are definitely not rinkydink operations. They are full-fledged, fancy-dancy establishments with seating for at least fifty people each. Every single one of these will not hesitate to serve you up artisan coffee in a fancy cup alongside a tiny slice of diabetes-inducing cake that you can eat while vegging out on a comfy chair with your eyes glued to your smartphone and occasionally schmoozing with your bestie. All issues about price, health, and lifestyle options aside, what really grinds my gears about this endless proliferation of coffee shops is that each and every one is a lazy excuse for a business idea, pure and simple. As well, instead of innovating, all they do is straight-up copy and paste the same old idea, flooding neighborhoods with generic, unnecessary businesses.
and streamlined research (i.e., Google) reveals that not only is clustering of businesses nothing new and the subject of at least one well-known economic model, but there are compelling historical, social, and even religious precedents that say putting similar businesses that close together is just plain wrong.
It is easy (and fun) to gripe about streets getting congested with these businesses, but further reflection
The New York Times reported an incident from a few years ago that can only be described as the definitive
2020�9��(September).indd 48
A Tale of Two Pizza Places
8/26/2020 4:37:22 PM
