Lacuna Moon

Sometimes I wonder if it might not be better if I wasn’t so honest.

The long and short of it is this:

I am tentatively not going to be starting my own business for the simple reason that, at this current stage, I cannot see a way in which I can make the business profitable when I consider the increasing number of restrictions that are being placed upon it.

The details:

While nearly everyone agrees that it would be nearly impossible to transmit a food-borne illness via coffee beans and tea, unless I carelessly created a homogeneous mixture of equal parts feces and tea leaves that could withstand the heat of water, it appears that the local health department has decided that the minutest possibility still exists and I am not allowed to receive, store or repackage either coffee or tea without first leasing or building a NSF-approved and state-inspected kitchen in which to do all of the above.

This would require NSF-approved shelving, triple sinks, a separate hand-sink and stainless steel preparation tables in a room that is separate and apart from a residential area and lacking in porous surfaces (e.g. tiled). Needless to say, I can’t build anything like that with the limited budget I am allowing myself. Leasing is an option, but when you expect to initially show a net profit less than $50 (my, so optimistic) a month (and not likely to grow quickly beyond that), there is a very good chance that I would be in the business of losing money.

I haven’t completely given up the idea right yet, but it is on shaky ground. I’ve decided to table the idea until I can resolve the incoming money with the outgoing costs.

Now consider this — if I had decided to do this as a shadow business on the internet, perhaps using something like E-Bay… Or even doing my store as designed, just not above the board…. I wouldn’t have run into this difficulty. That is, of course, as long as I managed to maintain a lack of fecal matter in my teas and nobody ever seeks legal action against my store because they got sick off of some renegade e. coli. You see, just because the event is unlikely 99.999% of the time, I would be the lucky business owner who would have an experience in that last 0.001% of the time. As the saying goes, “if I didn’t have bad luck, I wouldn’t have any luck at all”.

It’s really rather sad, as I had been looking forward to selling and making recommendations with respect to coffee and tea…. The money was incidental and not very much. It seemed like a good way to try and start saving up for a teahouse.

But I learned something from this experiment.

You see, I still want to open a store-front teahouse. I still want to open it here, where I have to adhere to pretty strict health codes. What I learned is this — I can pull off my business idea, just not as it was originally designed. I’ll have to rethink that design and pretty much think big, not small. But, its not as hard to do as I had thought initially — just certain details became impossible.

I also learned something about myself. As much as I enjoy a good cup of coffee and I really loved being a barista (and a pretty damn good one at that), I am not so sure that I am into coffee, per se. I am losing interest in the complexity of marketing the various mochachino-frappe-skinny-blah-blah-blah. I am preferring a simple shot, done excellently and failing that, I just want a cup of uncomplicated joe. Tea does have the danger of being connoisseur-ed to death, but almost anything can fall under that knife.

I learned that I’m not so certain that I want to bother with the complexity of offering both items in a future store. As time unfolds, I wonder if it might not be best to offer tea and be done with it.

I learned that I am more inclined to downsize my dreams than I am to expand them. Simple, small, peaceful. I think that if I could have enough room for 3 small tables, that might be just about right.

Take care all… I’m just beginning to dream.