Specialty Coffee Retailer

Specialty Coffee Retailer November 2012

Specialty Coffee Retailer is a publication for owners, managers and employees of retail outlets that sell specialty coffee. Its scope includes best sales practices, supplies, business trends and anything else to assist the small coffee retailer.

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coffee and tea shops. The spring count was down 1 percent to 30,002 shops. Tea houses are not broken out separately but comprise about 12 percent of the total. Contrast Starbucks and Whole Foods Markets. The "responsible" grocery was founded in 1980. In the next four years it opened four stores. In January 1999 it went public and soon aſter opened its 100th store. Today Whole Foods grosses $10 billion and operates 331 stores. The company employs 58,500. Will tea race the path blazed by Starbucks or take a more leisurely stroll like Whole Foods Market? Tazo and Teavana are the most likely to become the "Starbucks" of tea but two other fast-growth chains bear watching: Argo Tea is privately held with annual earnings greater than $20 million, according to TIME magazine. The company operates 30 locations, mainly in Chicago where it is headquartered, but with five locations in New York City and one each in Boston and St. Louis. The company's bottled teas, which sell for $2.40 for a 13.5-ounce bottle, can be found in more than 3,000 grocery locations, including Whole Foods Markets, Safeway and Dominick's. Investors, including billionaire Sam Zell and Oxford Capital, Argo Tea, a chain with 30 locations, has the look and feel of "a coffeehouse without coffee." 400 workers, most part-time. In October it opened its first overseas location, in Beirut, Lebanon. Groot wrote that "In the teahouse evolution, Argo has have fueled the company's expansion, which accelerated during the recession. The company now employs more than crossed over to a coffeehouse without coffee. I visited an Argo tea cafe on a recent big-city trip and while impressed with the execution of a mostly coffee-less coffeehouse, I am not sure that such a cafe has a cultural connectivity in much of America. As a matter of fact, the reason they succeed at all is their ability to look and feel like a coffeehouse. The layout of the store was similar to any decent coffee shop in America. The menu, 13

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