we moved the blog!

After a long and productive run here at blogger, we've decided to consolidate our blogs into our new wordpress site. Check it out at actualcafe.com/blog.

This blog won't be maintained anymore, but all the old content is migrated to the new site, so you won't have to look in both places. Come visit our new site.

thanks
sal

a year in review

Another year ended, another year begun (a whole month ago, I know, but it's been a busy month, and I haven't had much time to sit and write). I like taking a few minutes to pause and reflect at times like this - to look back at what's already happened, and look ahead at what's coming. Both pictures are good ones this year. I'm excited about what we've accomplished, and possibly even more excited about the prospects for the year ahead.

Fair warning: there's a lot here, and it rambles a bit. If I wrote these sorts of reflections more often, they might be more digestible, but I don't, and this one isn't. So...enjoy! :)

In 2011, Actual Cafe found its rhythm.

Although we always had a core group of customers who get what we do and are vocal supporters of our business and our neighborhood mission, it feels like a lot of folks just sort of recently realized that there's something interesting happening here. I see a lot of new faces every day, and the number of faces that I recognize grows all the time as well. People compliment me and our crew fairly often. We get positive reviews online. Press pays attention to us. These are all great things, for which I'm incredibly grateful.

One of the most important things that I've absorbed from the Cafe is how critical it is to find ways to appreciate positive things, rather than dwelling on the negative ones. There are literally always negative things - problems with the operation, unhappy customers, dwindling bank balances, unexpected equipment failures, fires, and on and on. This is an exercise in always trying hard and sometimes failing. Fortunately, there are also always positive things to spend energy on - happy customers, growing sales, employees who care and contribute, new events, fire extinguishers, etc.

The other important lesson that I keep learning over and over is that it's impossible to please everyone, and that by accommodating one person (or group), it's often at the expense of someone else's enjoyment of the business. We have a specific point of view and aesthetic here, and make no bones about it. Folks can choose to go elsewhere if they don't enjoy ours, but on the other hand, some go out of their way to come here because they do appreciate what we do or how we do it. We have a business operation that's complicated enough that it's hard for me to convey the complexity, and every decision comes with a cost and a benefit. Moving a plant from one corner to another, while seeming like an innocuous decision, might change where people choose to sit, or where people line up to order, or how much art can be hung on the walls, or where musicians or DJs set up, or whatever. Adding a new item to the menu might require sacrificing something else from the menu (something that someone will likely miss), in order to maintain the same overall cost structure. Adding a new power outlet will almost definitely lead to a tangle of cords and laptops in that location every day, which might make those laptop users happy, but might crowd out some other use of the space, or change the energy so that when someone new walks in the door, they get a different impression of us. And these things matter.

For me, it's really difficult to remember that lesson when a customer is frustrated. Running a successful service-oriented business requires being able to say 'yes' a lot (whenever possible, I think). But sometimes 'no' is required, and that's harder. No matter how good the reason, it's hard to convey, and folks often leave having heard the 'no' really clearly, but not so much the why. And c'est la vie - we do our best, and that's all we can do. This is a more challenging problem for a couple of interrelated reasons:

1) When customers walk in the door, they expect fast and correct service. For all the impact the Slow Food movement is making, there's no getting around the fact that many customers need to eat during a short lunch break, or grab coffee on their way to work after dropping off their kids or whatever, and they don't always have time to linger. There is a point beyond which getting faster diminishes quality of product, and we won't go past that point, but we will go faster when we need to and can.

In order to provide that fast and correct service, we have to have adequate staff. Because customers elect to arrive at different times on different days, and don't call in advance, we're at the mercy of the mob, and no amount of past experience can predict just how busy today's lunch will be. We don't have built-in walk-by traffic here - most folks have to make an effort to come to us, and this means a lot of variability in demand - we frequently have week-over-week swings in daily business of 25% one way or another. It's impossible to alter staff on an hour-by-hour basis, so it's inevitable that sometimes we'll be paying people who don't have a lot to do, and sometimes we'll end up without enough people to handle the unexpected rush. Yes, it's true that we have other work that the staff can do when there's not a line out the door, but: a) most of that work needs to get done every day anyway, so if we can't get to it during the time when we normally do, we'll have to make up the time somewhere, and b) human nature dictates that when there's a lot to do, folks will hustle to get it done, and when there's less, they'll take it a bit easier (this isn't an indictment of our staff - I do the same every day: we all work as fast as we need to). As an employer of humans, it's in my best interest to have a sane but substantial amount for each crew member to do during his or her shift - understaffing will create resentment, mistakes, dangerous working conditions and turnover, overstaffing will lead to wasted margin, boredom, lower tips, poor service (which compounds the lower tips), and also turnover.

2) The first impression for a new customer is impossible to overcome. If we make a great impression the first time, then screw something up later, we'll generally get a second chance; the more good impressions we make, the more slack we get. If we screw up on the first try, it's a pretty good bet we won't ever get another. And new customers often come in at unexpected times (or atypical ones - like a special event that makes the cafe look like a very different place than it does most of the time). I often tell my crew that the new customer (the one we've never seen before) is the most important customer in the room. Our regulars know us, and they get good service (we know their names and their orders, they know our menu - it's easy); new customers have a greater need to be welcomed and guided and smiled at and thanked.

So, when someone asks for more gluten-free sweets, or laptops on the weekends, or better lighting in the dining room, or whatever, we often can't deliver those things without taking something away. And the taking of something has an expense, both in terms of dollars and in terms of customer goodwill. We've added and taken away lots over the past two years (a lot just last year), and each decision alters our image, and changes our addressable customer base. Doing this too often, or too abruptly, or without a firm sense of who we are, is just plain dangerous - we'll piss off everyone and be left with no one to love us.

And, because I'm such a vocal person in such a visible business with a mission of community and openness, I find myself much more aware of how I carry myself everywhere (not just at work) - I know that if I do something stupid or irresponsible out in public, someone who knows what I'm up to is likely to see my screw-ups. This has made me a more measured person. When I say one thing here at the cafe and do another thing out in the world, it's a problem - I hate the possibility that I might be hypocritical (although I sometimes am), and so I spend more time examining my motives and looking at opportunities to improve my actions.

It's not always possible to be entirely forthcoming about the inner workings of the business, how it's doing, what I'm planning, and all. If, when asked by a customer about the state of things, I answered (honestly), "I've been having nightmares about escalating expenses and struggling to get them under control," it wouldn't inspire confidence. And I'm really familiar with the unfocused glaze that some business owners get when things are rocky - when you ask, 'How's business?', and they sort of squirm and say 'Oh yeah, pretty good.', and try (but fail) to project confidence. I'm sure that I'm guilty of having been that guy more than once.

But the fact is that what we do here isn't easy. If it were, new businesses would be occupying every storefront, and lots of local business owners would be constantly taking long trips to the Caribbean instead of sweating in their windowless offices all damn day. Even a healthy business goes through tumult. Systems break down, employees lose their edge, customers get bored, Starbuck's moves in across the street, interest rates go up, supply costs go up, labor costs go up, and customers don't necessarily have more to spend on what you're selling. And for a new business, it's hard to know what signs (of either strength or weakness) are harbingers of trends, and which are just mysterious isolated incidents. Without a track record to look back on, it's difficult to decide when to make an adjustment, and when to just wait and see.

I think about running this business like steering a big ship. If we force it, it'll wind up wrapped around a rock somewhere (or just out of gas from too much push and pull). I have to anticipate what's coming, and give it a little goose here and there to try and get it where I want it, but I don't always know what the wind or the tide will do, or when that albatross overhead will poop.

And because we're still growing, and have been since the very beginning, the biggest problem I face on a regular basis is how to keep up with that growth. It's not always an easy problem to solve.

Here are a couple concrete examples to illustrate how these things go:

Keeping up with customers at the counter

When we opened our doors, we put in a little cash register and wrote a lot of stuff down when we were taking orders. I couldn't justify spending several thousand dollars on a restaurant point-of-sale system - we certainly didn't need one then, and I didn't think we would anytime real soon. What we did worked reasonably well - sometimes we'd make an error (write something wrong, or read it wrong, or think something got done when it didn't), but when we made those mistakes, we could recover, and generally have the customer leave happy.

But as we grew, those systems started to fail. Customers were not getting stuff quickly enough, we couldn't work through the counter line quickly enough, and we were screwing up orders often enough that we started to get the reputation for making too many mistakes and taking too long to do so.

Throwing more people at the problem didn't help - we tried getting two folks taking orders at the counter, or one taking orders and one ringing the sales, we tried adapting our system to print work tickets, we tried more training on orders and tickets - we weren't licking it. One of the biggest frustrations for me on top of all that was that the cashier working the counter was spending so much time doing things (writing stuff down, running tickets to the various stations, swiping cards, making change, etc.) that they couldn't focus on the customer in front of them - we lost the ability to look folks in the eye and make them feel welcome. And believe me, this is a big deal.

So I started researching POS systems, now able to justify spending some money on one (it stopped mattering that it would cost money - our business was suffering every day that we couldn't fix the operation).

I looked at some of the big vendors (Aloha, Micros), and decided that they were a bad fit for us - we're not a big enough operation that we need to rely on a vendor to do everything for us, the initial cost and ongoing expense of running one of those systems was just too big, and they were based on 20-year-old tech.

I then looked at some of the startups in the space (Square, Lavu, Revel, others), and found their systems lacking (their customers were frustrated, their sales people didn't impress me, and there were key features that just didn't work right). I didn't want to trade one set of limitations for another.

Eventually, I found our current vendor - Auphan Dining. They're a little Canadian company with a system that works pretty darn well, they have lots of happy customers, their system is mature but not antiquated, they allowed us to reuse all the equipment we had already bought, and we can grow with them as the business grows. So, I wrote a couple thousand dollars in checks, and spent a couple months configuring the system (building and tweaking our menu, and making all our equipment work), writing documentation for the crew, and training everyone. We cut over to the new system in October, and although the first week really sucked, and we had some intermittent problems that we just finally licked a few weeks ago, it works really well.

Moving to the new system also had a side benefit - it allowed us to move our credit card processing to a new vendor (our old system had us locked in), which saves us a few hundred bucks a month. We'll have made the cost of the system back in the first year of operation. Also, the new system makes it much easier for us to get information about our own business - pulling and customizing reports just works, and I can get data when I'm at home, or out of town, and log in and fix things from there when I need to as well.

And now, we can look customers in the eye again and listen to what they tell us, while we get their orders right. We can get folks out of line and into a seat more quickly, and get work to the people who need it faster. We've had to figure out how to work two and three people to a station (requiring us to move equipment and ingredients around so each person could get to the things they needed for their tasks), and now when we get a rush, we can turn around orders consistently in under 10 minutes, and get the orders right - our error rate is way down.

I call this a good investment. (But it sure was a pain in the ass getting done.)

Night Business

It was really clear to me from the beginning that in order to fulfill our neighborhood mission, we needed to be open after dark. We set our hours pretty aggressively when we opened (we were open till 10pm 4 nights a week, and till 8 the others), and found when we hit our first full winter that we couldn't sustain that schedule, and went to our current one - open till 10 on Friday and Saturday, and 8 the other days. I always intended this to be a temporary state - in my ideal world, we'd be here till 10 five nights a week, and maybe even later on Friday/Saturday.

We experimented a bit with some hot meals last year, thinking that we might be able to establish some dinner business, but it quickly became clear that it wasn't going to make the difference we needed, so since then, I've been focused on trying to build a more pub-like atmosphere after dark - more great local beers (including rotating seasonals) and wines, more small plates (we'll be launching a new consolidated evening menu sometime in the next couple months), and special events.

We've always wanted to do interesting events here in the evening time, and we've tried lots of different ones, with varying degrees of success. Movies used to be every Wednesday, then moved to every Friday, and now happen once a month (and will go away soon - they just don't do well enough for us). DJs and cheap beer have helped our Friday evenings, but by themselves haven't done enough, either. Live music on Saturdays and Sundays is sometimes great, and sometimes not - we're dependent on the performers to bring a crowd with them.

Rachyel, one of our senior crew, has been booking music and managing online calendar listings for a year or so, and we realized several months ago that we had gone as far as we could with the staff and expertise we had between us. So I started reaching out to other folks who could create and manage ongoing event series, and given them time slots of their own, leaving us to focus on event promotion and calendars and staffing for the event. We've picked up a lot of these in the past months: Girls Rock Camp Music Trivia, Monthly Live Drawing parties, the Actual Jazz Series (recently expanded to twice monthly), and our brand new Bicycle Bingo weekly fundraiser; we're launching some new ones right now: a monthly Ukelele series hosted by our friend Mana Maddy, a new monthly DJ spot on last Sundays, and more coming.

We also did our first outside-curated art show - Femme Cartel - in January, and it was a huge success. We'll be doing more like this one whenever we can. It was great to see all the business on the block coming together and just having a blast. It's things like the success of Femme Cartel that give me the excitement that fuels the next project (and there's always a next project...). We're finalizing details for a 'zine show in our March/April slot that has all the hallmarks of being effing awesome. (more on that soon)

Starting January, we started running Afternoon Delight on Saturday Afternoons, selling pitchers of our excellent beers for $10 each, and trying to build a crowd before the live music starts on Saturday nights. It's only been a few weeks, but it's making a difference, and we hope to build a more consistent Saturday afternoon business and better music shows as a result.

We revamped our lighting to make it more pleasant in here at night. We built some new furniture (and there's more coming) to make seating more varied and conducive to groups. I'm doing all the furniture construction myself in my garage at home, so it will take a bit of time to get through all the little pieces I have planned. Look for them a little at a time over the course of the year.

It will take some time for all this to catch on - it's a tricky thing, trying to convince people that they ought to think of us differently, while not upsetting our core business (which is doing just fine, thanks, and which I have no desire to screw up as we try new stuff). I expect that, given consistent attention and creativity, we'll get where we want to be.

If you want to help, stop by at night more often! Also, please give me (or any of our staff) feedback about what would get you in here after dark. We get a lot of our best ideas this way.

The Space Race

We're not the smallest place in town, but we're not the biggest either, and we're starting to bump up against physical limits that are getting tougher to overcome. We've done a lot of reorganization, building new shelving, keeping better track of inventory, prepping in larger quantities, but some things are worrying me. Our business is growing still, and I don't want to get in its way - when customers want to order something, I want to be able to give it to them.

The optimal way for our business to grow would be for us to constantly step up the quantities of ingredients we buy, to reduce the per-unit cost (either because we get cheaper pricing when we buy more, or because we can shop less often or get more things delivered, which saves labor cost). Unfortunately, we can't always do this because we don't have space to store more. This is especially a problem with cold storage. We've got six refrigerators and two freezers running, tucked into every spare corner, and every one of them is regularly filled to the brim.

Certain ingredients (mixed greens for instance) are delicate and also space-hungry. When we're selling lots of salads, we go through a dozen cases of mixed greens every couple days. I'd love to be able to buy 15 or 20 or 25 cases at a time, but 25 cases of mixed greens fills a whole two-door refrigerator - we just don't have the space. This is just one example, but the fact is that we're shopping for produce literally every day, and still having trouble storing it all, and we don't go through it fast enough to make daily deliveries feasible (there's a minimum order size we can't make, so the delivery charges would make it too expensive). We're taking dairy deliveries twice a week, coffee twice a week, and soon we'll need to start taking empanadas twice a week.

We've already pruned a few things from the menu that weren't selling well and took up storage space. We're prepping smaller batches of some things when we can (which, unfortunately, increases our production cost on those items - labor is a big component of the total price of everything we make). Higher production cost means lower margin, which is not the best equation for us, but the fact is that economies of scale don't always materialize where I'd want them to.

We're also constrained on work space - we can't get more people into the kitchen to make stuff, so we're considering adding overnight prep to the schedule. We don't need to go there yet, but we might soon.

I don't have all the answers to these questions - we're actively working on the problem right now, and I hope we'll have some breakthroughs soon.

...

Anyway - I don't want to bore you all with lots of details, but I thought it might be interesting to give a little window into how a guy like me spends his days. Frequently, I look back at the last week, or the last month, and I don't know where all my time went, but know that I was busy. Aside from paying bills, answering emails, running errands (like buying produce, covering breaks for employees, dealing with staff communication, making payroll, designing our promo materials, maintaining our online presence, and just generally overseeing the operation, projects like these are what take most of my time and energy.

We've got some fun stuff cooking right now: we're finalizing design and working through the permit process for our permanent parklet. I recently posted an updated design on our facebook wall. It's pretty awesome, I think - I had some help (pro bono, fortunately) from the RECESS group on design, and it's definitely better than I could have done myself. I'm hoping for a build in late winter / early spring, and to have the parklet in place and usable when the weather is nice enough to start thinking about sitting on it.

Also (this is a big one), I'm planning an expansion into the adjacent space on Alcatraz. Expansion will allow us to solve some of the problems above, but it will do more new and exciting things that I'm not ready to talk about quite yet. Stay tuned...

...because in 2012, we're gonna kill it.

luvya,

sal

Bicycle Bingo has a Bingo Bicycle!

Thanks for our friend Jeff Tiedeken, aka Monkey Likes Shiny, aka Dr. E-ville, aka... (ok, you get the idea) - he built an awesome bike-driven bingo machine for Bicycle Bingo. Photos and videos here...check it out!

Bicycle Bingo - Launches in February

We've been working for a few months on an event that I'm really excited about, and that will launch in February (next week! on Groundhog Day!). It's called Bicycle Bingo, and it's a weekly fundraiser. We've teamed up with several not-for-profit orgs active in our neighborhood, and gotten sponsorship from Trumer, New Belgium, Lagunitas, and Chinook Book. We built a bicycle-driven bingo hopper (with the help of our favorite mad scientist/fabricator, Monkey Likes Shiny). We signed up local ingenue Steffy Sue on the Uke as our emcee. We got donated prizes from Chinook Book, Mike's Bikes, the Berkeley Bike Station, A Verb for Keeping Warm, James and the Giant Cupcake, The Essence of Beauty, Kinks Beauty Supply, and all the beer companies. The cafe will provide some prizes as well (did I need to say so?).

We selected partners who are relevant to our own neighborhood:

- East Bay Bicycle Coalition (first Thursdays, starting 2/2) advocates for bike lanes and roadway maintenance, holds bicycle safety classes for new urban cyclists, and generally promotes bicycle culture in Oakland and the greater East Bay

- Rebuilding Together Oakland (second Thursdays, starting 2/9) provides free home repairs and safety modifications to economically disadvantaged clients, especially the disabled and older adults. They organize neighborhood-wide maintenance days across Oakland, including in the Golden Gate neighborhood in October 2011. Their office is in the Golden Gate District.
- East Bay College Fund (third Thursdays, starting 2/16) provides College Guidance Services in High School, Scholarships, Mentoring, and Career Development for underrepresented students from Oakland public schools.
- United Roots Oakland (fourth Thursdays, starting 2/23) provides exposure to, support of, and training in arts, design and media for Oakland Youth ages 13-24. They offer youth leadership training, career & workforce development and support many important community campaigns.

...With special one-off fundraisers in long months with five Thursdays (like March, for instance).

Although you may be familiar with one or two of our beneficiary partners, you probably don't know them all. We figure that we can introduce them to supportive people and help spread the word about what they're doing, so they'll be here to meet you and tell you about why they're relevant.

Cards will be got for donations ($3/each, 2/$5, 5/$10) which will go directly to our partners. On top of that, we'll be donating 10% of everything we take in during the event. Beer sponsors will donate $1 from each pint sold, and we'll match what they give - so that for each $5 beer we sell, $2 goes to our partners. Chinook Book will donate $3 of each Chinook Book sold, and we'll match that as well (so that out of every $20 Chinook Book sale, our partners get $6).

But, even while we do good, we don't forget the having fun part. We built the bingo bike so that folks from the audience could come on up and pedal to select the winning numbers. We have lots of awesome prizes from which winners may select. There will be beer (and coffee, and food, and good company). Steffy Sue will be charming and entertaining. What's not to love?

It is my fervent hope that this event be successful for us and our partners. We'd like this to be something we do every week forever, and we want to help folks who do good in our neighborhoods fund their projects. All we need is for lots of people to come out and have a good time for a good cause. So please do.

The salient facts bear emphasis here:

- Thursdays 7-9!

- No cover charge!

- All ages admitted!

- Win prizes!

- Enjoy refreshments!

- Support folks who do good in your very own community!

- Maybe get to ride the Bingo Bike (if you're real lucky)!

See you there.

sal

our first million dollars...what it means.

I have been meaning to sit down and write another 'year end reflection' sort of post, and haven't had the time. This isn't that post. I will write it. Soon. Pinky swear.

In the meantime...

I realized the other day while I was working on closing my books for the end of the 2011 that the cafe had crossed the million-dollar total revenue mark recently (we made a bit over $400k last year and about $600k this year). "That's pretty awesome," said I to myself. Then I looked at the profit over these years, which totals just under $0 (our opening loss in 2009 wipes out every dollar made in 2010 and 2011, and then a few more). "So that's not so awesome," thought I. And then I thought more about it. Every single dollar that's come through the front door of this cafe has gone somewhere, and every one of them has had some impact where it landed.

The biggest chunk went to our vendors - over $350k went to buy the stuff we sell; $50k went to supplies, $25k to repairs. Since almost all those vendors are local businesses, a chunk of their dollars are being spent somewhere in town, and then recirculating more.

The next biggest chunk went to our crew - we've paid out over $350k in salaries. Because almost all our employees live within about a mile of the cafe, it's a good bet that a chunk of these dollars reappear on the streets of Berklandville as well.

$70k went to rent. My landlord happens to be a partnership of guys who live in Oakland and Berkeley, so some of their dollars also go back into the local moneystream.

$5k went to entertainers. $1,500 went to charities. All local.

We've collected and paid $70k in sales tax (that's separate from the million bucks). Those dollars go to schools, police, firefighters, roads, and other useful stuff. (Granted, they do other less-useful things as well, but that's the nature of taxation.)

The rest went to things like insurance, utilities ($45k!), permits, taxes, and on and on. (Almost $20k went to credit card processing fees, depressingly.)

This constant recirculation of money is the sort of thing that people on the radio and the TV call 'the economy', but that's a bit abstract. Looking at real facts and figures helps make it a bit more concrete, at least for me. If I were a politician, I'd say that we 'created' a million dollars in 'economic activity' or 'increased the local economy' by a million bucks or some such. Since I'm not a politician, I don't know exactly how I'd say it, but certainly the fact of the existence of Actual Cafe has contributed to the movement of dollars, and the fact that we prioritize doing business in our own community means that activity happens more often in our own backyard. Of course, the nature of 'the economy' is such that streams of money flow all over the damn place in the end - there's no stopping them going literally all around the world and back.

I feel like an NPR reporter right now.

luvya,

sal

It's been TWO WHOLE YEARS!!! Come Celebrate with us!

In December, Actual Cafe is celebrating two years of operation in Oakland’s Golden Gate district. On Friday December 9th from 5-10pm, we'll commemorate the occasion with the opening of a retrospective art show, entitled “We Are The People In Your Neighborhood”, and featuring our favorite artists who have shown at the cafe in the past year, along with artists from the Actual Cafe staff.

We'll have a repeat engagement of our free DIY s’mores stations on the sidewalk outside the cafe, and our friends at the East Bay Bike Party will be organizing a gathering during our party which will depart from the cafe for the start of EBBP’s regular monthly ride at 7:15pm. DJs Oze and Lifeone will spin records, and we'll have lots of other fun stuff that we haven't figured out yet.

Artists in the show will include: Jon Suzuki (bicycle photography), Eva Silverman & Querido Galdo (Oakland and other urban photography), Alexis Babayan (woodcuts of local street scenes), Nissa Nicole (photography), Lauren Aczon (street corner illustrations), along with two of the cafe crew: Kim Babnik (character illustrations) and Rachyel Puleo (photography).

We'll also be unveiling our new indoor mural (also entitled “We Are The People In Your Neighborhood”), by our own Kimbo Babnik! It'll be awesome. Trust us.

'We' means all of us, but especially you. So don't miss the party, K?

luvya,
sal & the whole actual crew


Eva Silverman - “Hair”

Nissa Nicole - untitled (Green Bicycle)


Querido Galdo - “Oakland Found”


Rachyel Puleo - “Cafe”


Kim Babnik - “Mermaid”


Lauren Aczon - “Oakland”


Jon Suzuki - untitled (vintage bike chain guard)

Press release for our Park(ing) Day weekend celebration

9/5/2011
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

ACTUAL CAFE, GOLDEN GATE COMMUNITY ALLICANCE, A PLACE FOR SUSTAINABLE LIVING
AND OTHER SAN PABLO & ALCATRAZ BUSINESSES
ANNOUNCE A PARK(ING) DAY WEEKEND CELEBRATION
WITH PARKLETS, NEW SIDEWALK FURNITURE, AND EVENTS ALL WEEKEND LONG

Actual Cafe, Walk Oakland Bike Oakland (WOBO), the East Bay Bicycle Coalition (EBBC), the Golden Gate Commmunity Alliance (GGCA), A PLACE for Sustainable Living, along with other neighborhood volunteers, will reconstruct the Actual Cafe parklet which debuted in May of this year, as well as creating three new sidewalk planter/bench combinations for other businesses (The Essence of Beauty, James and the Giant Cupcake, and Kinks Beauty Supply). All these elements will be built from reclaimed building materials (some of which were donated by the Re*use People Store in East Oakland), and will be installed in time for Park(ing) Day, on September 16th. The Actual Cafe parklet will remain in place through Park(ing) Day weekend (9/16-9/18). The new sidewalk furniture will remain in place permanently.

Actual Cafe has been an advocate for parklets since its opening in 2009. The cafe abuts a no-longer-operational AC Transit bus stop, which creates a long stretch of vacant (and unusable) pavement immediately outside its window. Hosting a permanent parklet in that bus stop is a dream of Sal Bednarz, owner of the cafe, which appears increasingly likely to become a reality in the near future. On Park(ing) Day from 5-8pm, Actual Cafe will host its regular Friday evening DJ happy hour in the parklet (weather permitting). The cafe will be asking visitors to sign a petition to the City of Oakland to grant a permanent permit for the Parklet, as well as hosting a guest book and inviting comments through the weekend. WOBO parklet passport holders will receive stamps at the cafe, as well as a 10% discount all weekend long; all other businesses on the block will also offer discounts to passport holders.

In addition, on Saturday, 9/17, from 9am-6pm, a block party will be held on 64th Street between San Pablo Avenue and Marshall Street. Sponsored by A PLACE for Sustainable Living coordinating with its neighbors, including St. Columba Catholic Church and Rebuilding Together Oakland, it will feature a flea market in St. Columba's parking lot from 9AM to 2PM, along with music and other activities. The party will be held entirely in what would otherwise be parking spaces on the block. Performances include: Korean Drumming, children's theater by Marin based sustainability education troupe Next Generation and folk/blues by Ariel Eisen and John Bennet.

The new San Pablo Avenue sidewalk furniture will follow the same construction style and methods as the Actual Cafe parklet, and is intended to integrate the entire block between Alcatraz Avenue and 63rd Street into the parklet experience. In addition to providing seating in the form of benches, planters in the structures will contain plants provided by A Verb for Keeping Warm (another block business) who will use them to create pigments for their yarn dyeing studio. The planters will incorporate an ingenious self-watering design using recycled plastic bottles and a water reservoir to provide constant water to the plants above and reduce the need for regular watering.

Many of the original Actual Cafe parklet components were taken after its debut in May after being disassembled and left outside the cafe, to the disappointment of neighbors and volunteers who contributed to its construction. Says Sal Bednarz, owner of Actual Cafe, "I can't wait to have the parklet back in place so neighbors can experience it again, and for the day when it becomes a permanent fixture of the neighborhood. I'm also really excited to be expanding the parklet through the installation of sidewalk furniture for our neighbor businesses." During its first incarnation, the cafe's parklet was admired by literally thousands of visitors in just a few days, at the EBBC Bike After Work Day party, and during the following weekend at the cafe. Says Bednarz, "It also had a substantial traffic calming effect on what is normally a really dangerous intersection - people were slowing down to look, and also just taking it a bit easier because they saw the parklet in the street."

The City of Oakland is within weeks of issuing its first RFP for parklet proposals, and intends to grant eight parklet permits this year, in a pilot program that will hopefully expand into a regular parklet process in early 2012, according to Blair Miller, chair of the cross-functional task force at the City of Oakland responsible for developing a parklet process in the city. Actual Cafe intends to be a participant in the pilot program, and will use materials developed during this weekend event to show neighborhood and area-wide support for its parklet and parklets in general. "There is no doubt in my mind that the commitment of the community to help Actual Cafe build one quality parklet, let alone two, motivated the City of Oakland to start taking parklets seriously," said Ruth Miller (no relation), parklet program coordinator for Walk Oakland Bike Oakland. "I look forward to seeing the other parklets imagined and built all over Oakland and San Francisco, but there's something really special about taking your friends into the Golden Gate neighborhood and saying: 'that parklet that's full of people and activity - I built that!' Building a parklet is a unique and wonderful way to support your community."

Park(ing) Day and the following weekend will be observed by other Oakland businesses with various temporary parklet installations. These include Farley's East on Grand Avenue, Arizmendi on Lakeshore Blvd., and another Lakeshore location hosted by the Lakeshore Merchants Association.

CONTACTS & MORE INFO:
Park(ing) Day: www.parkingday.org
Actual Cafe: www.actualcafe.com / Sal Bednarz / actualcafe@gmail.com / 510.735.6016
Walk Oakland Bike Oakland: www.wobo.org / Ruth Miller / ruth@wobo.org / 770.312.9295
A PLACE for Sustainable Living: www.aplaceforsustainableliving.org / Takahiro Noguchi / takahiro.noguchi@gmail.com / 510.213.8252
Golden Gate Community Alliance: www.goldengateoakland.org / Dan Woloz / dan@bikemandan.com
A Verb for Keeping Warm: www.averbforkeepingwarm.com / Kristine Vejar / kristine@averbforkeepingwarm.com
The Essence of Beauty: www.4theessenceofbeauty.com / Andrea Abdullah / andreaabdullah7@yahoo.com / 510.601.1972
James and the Giant Cupcake: www.jamesandthegiantcupcake.com / Eurydice Manning / jamesandthegiantcupcake@gmail.com
Kinks Beauty Supply: 510.655.7002
twitter #oaklet

more...of just about everything.

The months just fly by, and there's a lot that I'd like to blog about in order to keep a record, and always lots to communicate to all of you. But it just doesn't work out that way so much. I (rightly, I think) prioritize keeping the day-to-day operation here under control, which is a growing job as our business grows. We had an unexpectedly busy summer, in terms of customers and revenue - where last year we got less busy in June through August, this year we're busier every month. This is partly a function of having new neighbors with growing businesses, who attract more people to the block (who sometimes want a coffee or a waffle or whatever), and partly just us attracting new customers through word of mouth. Honestly, since we opened, it's been all we could do to keep up with growth, and that's still the case. Good problems to have, they say. Someday, I'll be trying to figure out how to get more customers through the door, but right now, you all just keep on coming. Thanks for that. :)

Growth means constant adjustment - we built systems that worked reasonably well at the beginning, but every few months we've had to re-engineer what we're doing to make our operation more efficient and consistent as more customers decided they wanted to spend their money here. We've had some problems along the way - some things haven't worked out as well as we'd hoped, and sometimes staff and customers suffered for it. But on the whole, we've been doing pretty OK. We've also managed to build a stronger crew over time - each time we grow the staff, I feel like we improve. We're at a point where three quarters of our staff has been here for over 6 months, and almost half have been here a year or more. This in a business which has only been around for a bit more than a year and a half in an industry known for high turnover - I think we're doing pretty well on that front, and hope we continue to.

We've spent a lot of the past 9 months adjusting our food menu, adding new bakery goods, establishing rotating specials (and adding new things to the menu as we went). Also, we've had to improve the speed and efficiency of our counter operation - turning out food and drinks faster, ringing sales faster, setting up stations so that two people can work side-by-side when things get really busy, improving our inventory and prep schedules, etc. We've also really beefed up our entertainment calendar - we've got live music every Saturday, and most Sundays, and our standing Friday evening happy hour (with DJs, movies, and other fun stuff). We're getting more great performers, more great art, and more great folks to throw their events here, and have even more coming. We've already planned out the remainder of our arts calendar for the year, and have some exciting stuff coming that we think you'll all really love.

We're focused right now on making some adjustments to our coffee program - we recently switched our decaf to a new product that we like a lot better, and we're making some minor recipe changes as well (watch for those over the next month or two). We're also improving our general drink quality and consistency - although we've always had some great baristas, we also had to hire folks who could handle food, and they haven't always had the best coffee chops. I'm happy to say that we've made some good progress on this front in the past couple months, but there's more to be done - we'll keep at it.

We're really excited to be hosting our first multi-venue art show in September: Fuzzy Logic - Oakland Threads is a group fiber arts show that will be hosted here and at James and the Giant Cupcake, and Threads of Transition, Patterns of Change - Rabari Textiles of India will be hosted by A Verb for Keeping Warm. We'll be opening both shows on September 9th, from 5-10pm, with DJs, free cupcakes, popcorn, happy hour specials, and a screening of The Muppet Movie. It looks to be a real swell time, so make a point of dropping by.

But, maybe the most exciting news...right now, we're working on re-building our parklet! Park(ing) Day is next month (September 16th), and we're one of many Oakland businesses who will be deploying temporary parklets during that weekend. Ours will be the most permanent of the crop, and we're told by the folks at the City of Oakland that there will be an RFP issued in the next several weeks which will allow us to apply for one of eight parklet permits to be granted in a pilot program. I see no reason why we would be denied a permit, and I can't wait for the day that the parklet becomes a permanent fixture of the block.

As part of the Park(ing) Day brouhaha, we're helping the Golden Gate Community Alliance build new sidewalk furniture for several businesses on our block (The Essence of Beauty, James and the Giant Cupcake, and Kinks Beauty Supply). We're using a design similar to what we did for the parklet for sidewalk planters and benches, and really trying to integrate the entire block in the parklet experience. I can't tell you how excited this makes me. I hope you feel the same. The planter/benches will become permanent fixtures of the block immediately - although we'll need to take the parklet away after the weekend, the sidewalk furniture will remain.

Park(ing) Day weekend is shaping up to be a three-day block party here at SP/Alcatraz: we'll be listed in the nationwide Park(ing) Day directory, and expect lots of folks coming by on Friday to check out the parklet. We're having our regular Friday night happy hour that night on the sidewalk adjoining the parklet, which ought to be fun. On Saturday (9/17), St. Columba Church (across the street from us) is having a big yard sale in their parking lot, and the folks at A PLACE for Sustainable Living are planning a street closure and block party on 64th and San Pablo for the day (details soon...). On Sunday (9/18), we'll have a sidewalk party with entertainment from noon-4:00, and will again invite press, politicians and other folks from the area to soak up the parklet vibe and get excited about our parklet and Oakland parklets in general. We'll be circulating a petition for signatures which will help ease us through the permit process, and also stamping Oakland parklet passports all weekend long. Passport holders will receive a 10% discount all weekend as well (more details about passports coming...).

We've got more in store...Halloween/Dia de los Muertos things in October with a great solo photography show by Varese Layzer; a group food-themed art show in November, with a special Plaid Friday party, and more, more, more!

Also, I think we can officially declare Laptop-Free Weekends a success, thanks to all of you. We've managed to do something a little different here, and our customers love us for it. I hope some of the folks who harassed me and us in the early days have taken the time to stop by and experience what we're doing, and that maybe we've helped a couple people see things in a new way.

So...

Stop by and share the love. It's real.

-luvya,

sal & the actual crew

parklets, built, enjoyed, now missing...

It's been a busy spring for us here, and for me personally. I've been training for AIDS/Lifecycle, and I'm leaving in just a couple weeks to ride my bike from San Francisco to Los Angeles to raise funds for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation (www.tofighthiv.org/goto/salbednarz for more). It's been a lot of work, finding time to train and run the business, and getting prepared to be gone for 10 straight days in June. I agonized over the decision for a while, and recently decided that it was time to hire a manager; once I did, I spent a couple months trying to find the right person. I think I did - Chris is his name, and he's been here for a couple weeks now. If you see him at the counter, welcome him. I'm looking forward to many improvements in the operation once he gets settled in - stay tuned for that.

But on top of all this, I have been working with Walk Oakland, Bike Oakland, the East Bay Bicycle Coalition and others, trying to get permission to install a Parklet (http://sfpavementtoparks.sfplanning.org/ if you don't know what a parklet is) in the defunct bus stop at the end of Alcatraz (right outside our window). Although parklets have been deployed in San Francisco for a couple years now, there's no process to do the same thing here in Oakland. We spent time speaking to various City departments, and couldn't get a clear answer about how to proceed.

So we built one.

We spent just a few hundred dollars, and used mostly reclaimed and donated materials, and only volunteer labor. Our friends at WOBO and EBBC, and especially the PLACE for Sustainable Living contributed tons of hours to help us get all the construction done. It was beautiful, I think.

It went to EBBC's Bike After Work party in Old Oakland, where it was a big hit, then came back here for our Parklet Love-In, which was tons of fun - we had lots of friends and neighbors come out, and everyone had great things to say about the parklet. It got well used that day.

After the weekend was over, I disassembled the parklet into its components, and stacked it up on the sidewalk to get it ready to move into storage until we had another event or could get a permit for permanent installation.

Then the bad thing happened. I was so wiped out from all the parklet building, and other Bike Month things we'd been working on, that I left the parklet pieces sitting on the sidewalk for longer than I ought to. Someone (and maybe multiple someones) helped themselves to the pieces before I noticed and could do anything about it.

So we're out a parklet. Which is sad. It's not the money, or even the time I spent, that I'm sad about. It's the fact that so many other folks gave their sweat and blood (literally) to get the thing built, moved, re-built, etc. I don't want their work to have been wasted.

So, I'm trying to spread the word as widely as I can, and enlist whatever help we can get, to find and get the parklet returned to us. I'm relatively sure that the folks who took it didn't think they were doing anything wrong, and if they get wind that we're looking for it, they'll bring it back home.

Please, if you've seen our parklet, let us know. If you took it, please bring it back. I'll make it worth your while - no questions asked. No one here is angry - just sad and hopeful.

luvya,
sal

musings near the end of Daylight Saving Time...

It's almost spring. Which always makes me look at the world a bit differently. Days get longer, flowers start blooming, and we sell more salads and less soups.

It seems like an appropriate time for reflection and planning, and we're looking forward to an exciting year ahead. We have new neighbors moving in across the street - a (still unnamed) sustainability center, which includes lots of our friends (the Sustainable Living Roadshow, B Spoke Tailor, Spokeland, and many more). They're doing interesting things already, and they're not even really open yet. Stop by if you're in the area and say hello - they're friendly, and almost always there.

Daylight Saving Time ends next Sunday, and we'll be looking at extending our mid-week hours again. Immediately, we'll be open until 9pm on Wednesdays, to allow us to start movies when it's dark enough to actually see them.

We have a ton of exciting stuff going on this month, and it's just a little piece of what we're working on for the upcoming year.

First, we'll be opening an art show of photography and illustration this month - Osmos, by Japhy Riddle. We're doing what we can to fill the cafe with interesting art that has something to say about the people and places in our very own neighborhood, and we think Japhy's photography fits the bill nicely (his illustration says more about what he sees when he closes his eyes, but it's also cool). The opening will be next Saturday, and will include music by Japhy's band, Cadet. Looks to be a fun party.

On the 13th, we'll have another edition of Second Sundays with the Songwriters Collective, which is becoming quite the popular and well-received event.

Also this month (on Sunday March 20th), we'll be hosting another Men's & Women's Clothing Swap. The last time we did this, it was a huge success, and folks had a ball. We're looking forward to more of the same.

On the 25th of March, we'll be hosting a very special fundraiser for AIDS/Lifecycle, to raise money for the SF AIDS Foundation, which provides essential services to people with (and at risk to contract) HIV - not just in San Francisco, but all over the state (they're also involved in AIDS projects worldwide). We'll be doing these events for the next three months (until the ride itself). This month, the event will be sponsored by our friends at New Belgium Brewing, and they'll be doing live silk-screening during the event (which is kinda neato), as well as donating a bunch of raffle prizes and matching the first $500 we raise during the event. We'll be joined by another special friend, the LIBA falafel truck, which will be parked outside selling delicious falafelness. DJs Sixty4K and Kid Frostbite will dish tasty records, and we'll be raffling off all sorts of cool prizes. A portion of everything sold during the night will go to the ALC fund, so all you have to do to support the cause is show up and spend a couple bucks.

On the 26th, Rad Dad Zine will be having their zine release party, with live music, readings from the zine, and more.

Wow. And that's not even everything. Some great movies on Wednesdays this month, more music on Saturday nights, more Decompression Sessions on Friday nights, and of course, our popular weekend brunch.

working hard for it, cause we luvya
-sal & the actual team

we're changing some things...

we've had an exciting holiday season, and wrapped up an excellent first year. thanks again to all of you who have been a part of our thing, helping us in every way, every day.

now, to kick off the new year in true corner-shaking style...

we've got some exciting new things rolling out this week:

our morning pastry baker (artisan foods of berkeley) has given up their pastry business, and we’re forced to adapt. we’re taking the opportunity to freshen up our baked goods, and to do some new things ourselves. here’s the deal:

we’re doing some more stuff inhouse:

we’ve started baking delicious frittatas, to replace the quiche we were buying from artisan. this lets us expand variety, and introduce seasonal flavors as we go. we’ll be putting out a veggie and a meat frittata every day, at the same price as our quiche/quiche plate used to be. we like the frittata better because it’s more protein, less fat, and wheat-free.

we’re also baking fresh fruit scones every morning. we’ll start with just a couple flavors (pear/almond and lemon/currant for now) and play with others once we get comfortable with them. once we’ve got these nailed, we may start experimenting with other baked goods (muffins, etc.). we started selling these yesterday, and got a lot of smiling customer feedback, so give em a try.

we also started baking our own brownies, to replace the artisan brownies we used to have. they're a bit different, but also really delicious - sticky and fudgy...yum.

and, we’re bringing in some new yummy baked stuff:

as of today, we’ll be taking croissants and morning buns from our awesome bread bakers, hopkins st. bakery. the product is a bit different from what we’ve been getting, but really good. we think hopkins st.’s morning buns are the most delicious we’ve tried (especially the cranberry ones)

we’re taking some new stuff from zazou’s bakery, experimenting with their delicious new coffee cakes, banana and zucchini bread, as well as some fruit tartlets. these are superb, and we’re excited to be carrying product from another small local baker.

AND...we've got almond milk!

recently, a lot of people started asking for almond milk. now we have it. :)

ask for it in your drink - it's the same price as soy for an espresso drink, and no charge on a granola.

we’re keeping all our prices the same.

we’d love your feedback. please try our new items and let us know if you love (or hate) them. if you thing we’re missing something, tell us that, too.

stay tuned...as always, there's more to come...

luvya,
actual staff

one year in...and surely thankful

Firstly: it's been a helluva long time (again) since I've posted anything here. I'd like to say that I've meant to, but that's not even true. I've been so busy that posting to the blog hasn't even made the list.

But, it's just about our one year anniversary - we opened our doors on December 14th of 2009! That's a milestone that I think deserves a bit of reflection. It's a couple weeks after thanksgiving, but I've been thinking about what I'm grateful for in relation to this business, and also not-so-grateful. As with any project, things rarely look like their plans, and this seems like a good time to take stock of our first year, pass on some thanks, and talk about this neighborhood, this business, and my life over the past year. So, here goes...

Things I'm grateful for:

1) our customers
I've said it before, and I'll say it again - we have the best customers I could have ever hoped for. A combination of neighborhood folks, bicycle enthusiasts, and those who go out of their way because they think we're doing something interesting here. When new employees start, they almost invariably mention that customers are friendly, patient, interesting, and good tippers. Most of these employees have worked in many other similar places, and are used to a different experience when dealing with the public.

Actual Cafe would not be in business today, and won't be in business in another year, without you all. Thank you for your support, your tolerance of our rough edges, your friendly attitudes, and your smiling faces. You're why we're here.

2) our staff
In a business like this one, it's difficult to pay folks much money. Our margin is small, and what we do is very labor-intensive. Payroll cost is our highest non-goods expense, by far. It's about four times as much as our rent, utilities and insurance combined. Our employees make much of their income from tips, and this will always be the case (so be generous when you can and when they deserve it).

So, there need to be other things to motivate employees to do a good job. Here, it's our customers (see #1), the neighborhood mission (most of our folks could walk from home to work, and many ride their bikes here every day), the character of the place, and the others they work with. On our windows, it says 'friendly folks' - these are them.

We've got a strong staff, that cares about supporting each other and at making the best food and drinks they can, smiling as they go. This is not trivial, especially keeping in mind that things have evolved quickly here, and we're still figuring things out. Job responsibilities and hours change, and it's a rare group of people who can thrive in an environment like this one, and not wear out. Especially with a nut like me as a boss.

Even so, we've lost many employees along the way, and not everyone has worked out well here. Over the course of the year, we've lost 13 people. The chaos of the early months wore some folks out. Others left for other things - moving out of the area, having babies, new jobs. A few I let go. We started the year with 6 employees. We're ending the year with 16 (maybe 17)! This means I've hired a total of 29 people along the way, which averages about 2.5 per month. If you figure that the average stay of a cafe worker is in the neighborhood of six months, I figure we'll average about the same for every month going forward - 2.5 employees leaving, 2.5 new ones to interview and train.

(Maybe we can improve on that 6 month average stay...whew! :) )

I've been working on growing some management out of the existing staff, to give them the opportunity to get more experience and get credit for their hard work. Anyone who stays here for more than a couple months leaves a bit of themselves behind in the character of this place - I want the people who have done so much to build what we've got to reap the benefits, rather than bringing in new folks to boss them around in some new way.

In any case, our staff is only getting stronger as we go. We'd be nowhere without all the quirky and wonderful individuals who have sweated their little butts off for you, and you'd love us a whole lot less without them. Where customers are the 'why,' they're the 'how.'

3) our impact on the neighborhood
In so many ways, the cafe has already fulfilled it's mission. If I were hit by a truck tomorrow, I'd go to the afterlife knowing I had accomplished something important here; I hope that it endures and grows even more over time.

I wanted to provide a place in my own neighborhood that would serve as a community hub. I wanted this area, which felt disjointed and under-serviced, to feel like a real neighborhood. I wanted to live somewhere where I could walk to places that I liked. We're becoming that place, even though there's still a lot more to do.

Before we opened, our intersection was a full-time hangout for neighborhood pimps and prostitutes. There were fights on the street. There was trash. San Pablo here was a stretch of road that people avoided. That's changed, and really quickly.

In the first few months we were open, we had our share of pimps and girls coming in. There were a pair who would sit at our front counter and text the girls on the sidewalk outside for hours. I had to ask them to leave multiple times. Every once in a while, one of them shows up and I have to chase him away again. But in general, that activity just doesn't happen much here anymore. (To be sure, it hasn't gone away, it's just moved somewhere else...but I'll take a selfish victory point anyway.)

We've had some trouble with thieves - I caught a guy inside my office once, going through my things. We had a couple customers who had their laptops snatched. We probably lost some counter tips a couple times. Someone stole some of our chairs, and someone else vandalized one of our awnings. I'm not happy about any of these things, but on the whole, it hasn't been too bad - no one has been hurt (or even come close to it), and I'd expect similar sorts of disruption in any neighborhood around here.

What's really exciting to me is that now other businesses are considering moving into this neighborhood, and they're the kind of businesses that can really make even more difference. There were already several art spaces around before we opened, and we've had a few more join the ranks during the year. Our new friends at A Verb For Keeping Warm moved into the space next door to us just a couple weeks ago, and they've added a splash of light and color to the block, as well as lots of new smiling folks. One of our customers has been working on a project for a sustainable technologies compound really nearby - I hope it works out for him and that project happens (last I heard, he was waiting on some grant applications and otherwise trying to raise money for the project).

I always knew that this area was full of all kinds of interesting people - young folks and old, artists and professionals, students and families, black, white and otherwise, rich, poor and everything in between. But until I started working on this project, we had nowhere to gather and meet each other. That's changing, and I'm proud to have been a part of the change. I'm happy to have met so many of you. My favorite part of this job is meeting someone new who's enthusiastic about what we're doing, or meeting someone from my neighborhood with a story to tell. It's the thing that can get me through the hard times and remind me how far we've come.

4) the support of my wonderful girlfriend
I am clearly insane.

I know this because I got involved with a woman while I was preparing to launch the cafe, and (even crazier), she was preparing to launch her own new business. Her name is Gail, and she's awesome. She owns the Liba Falafel Truck (libafalafel.com), which makes the best falafel I've ever had (for real), and we've been together for a year and a half (give or take a month). It's been the best year and a half I've ever spent with anyone.

I've lost a lot of sleep this year, but I would have lost a whole lot more if I hadn't had Gail around to talk to, to encourage me, to make me delicious and nourishing meals when I was so exhausted I would have eaten anything (or nothing). She's been an invaluable voice of reason, and a problem solver when I've been in a bind. She's been a source of comfort when I needed it, and a good swift kick in the ass once in a while as well.

I hope that I've been half as much to her.

things i'm less grateful for:
1) the laptop policy kerfuffle
In February, we launched our laptop-free weekend experiment. It stirred up a whole lot of controversy, and was one of the harder things for me personally to manage over the course of the year. The policy has been, by and large, a great success, but I've been weathering the slings and arrows of outraged technophiles all year, and that's made the entire experience feel a bit tainted.

It was so important to me (and it remains so), that this place be different from most other cafes in the area. I wanted to imbue it with a personal touch, and encourage our customers to relate to it in a way that they had forgotten they could. I have no affection for chain stores. It's impossible for me to form a real relationship with a place where the owners don't make their presence felt. Impersonal places that feel like every other place remind me of airports and strip malls - the least charming parts of the American landscape.

So, we did it - we asked people to leave their laptops at home on the weekend.

And we got a lot of publicity. Maybe too much. The fact of our being in everyone's faces for a couple weeks meant that anyone who didn't love what we were doing had their opinion galvanized. It set folks against each other. It brought out the worst in some. I was sworn at, glared at, personally insulted, and generally harangued. And, of course, it's my own damn fault - I said and wrote all the things that I said and wrote. No one put words in my mouth. I might have said or written some different things with the benefit of a bit of time to reflect. Oops.

In any case, the criticism stung. For a period of a several months, I couldn't read our yelp reviews (which, by the way, caused me to miss some cues and not fix other issues that I could have addressed more quickly) - they anger I saw got me really twisted up inside. Even now, it's difficult for me to read the stuff that got posted back then.

On the other hand, the policy has had the desired effect in many ways. We have what I consider to be a much better balance than a lot of local cafes.

Weekend days are now our most financially lucrative days of the week, and folks regularly go out of their way to mention to me or the staff that they're grateful about the lack of laptops on the weekend. On the weekends before we implemented the policy, we were usually crowded (and often full to capacity), but we spent our days slinging two-dollar coffees and teas, and not making all that much money. We saw so many people come in, look around, see nowhere to sit, and leave. Now, the place is busy, but usually not full, and our weekend brunch menu has been encouraging folks to come for a meal and linger for a bit of conversation or reflection, instead of burying themselves in a project (or in their facebook) for the entire day for the price of a cup of tea. We make more money, the staff and I are happier doing it, and the folks who come here on the weekends love it. So, that's good, right?

And on weekdays, we've achieved a better balance as well. Although we still have laptop users, and free wifi during the week, we don't have the same concentration as many other places. Generally, it feels more lively inside to me, and that's what I wanted to achieve. We continue to offer a limited number of outlets, and ask people not to string power cords all over the place or climb our walls to get to the ones that aren't intended to have laptops plugged into them.

The policy has become self-selecting. Generally, folks know what we're up to, and they come here if they like it, and go elsewhere if they don't. This is perfectly reasonable and respectable behavior. Ask any economist.

But, here's the real thing that gets me going when I think about it: What is it about cafes that makes people feel entitled to demand a certain experience? And I don't mean asking politely, or making suggestions, but becoming outraged when we're not exactly like the guy down the street? Why, instead, do we not support and encourage heterogeneity in our local business experience?

To those people: Would you demand that a sushi place serve a hamburger? Would you demand that a fancy restaurant let you in in your cut-offs and flip-flops? Do you smoke inside public buildings? Do you yell at the folks at Fairyland because they won't let you in without a child accompanying? What about parks that don't allow dogs? We tolerate electronic strip-searches and pat-downs in the name of security, but can't tolerate being asked to leave our laptops at home in the corner cafe on the weekends? It all seems a bit skewed to me. Get over it.

What it really boils down to is that some folks get it and love it, some folks don't get it and don't care, and a few folks don't get it and get angry. C'est la vie. If I had to do the whole thing over again, I'd probably end up with the same policy, but I'd handle the communication a bit differently. Maybe.

2) yelp
Until I opened here, I mostly thought of Yelp as a good thing. I used it (and still do) to find businesses, and to get some idea of what they're about. I posted a handful of reviews over the years. I had read about Yelp sales trying to strong-arm small businesses, and other questionable tactics, but I didn't pay them that much attention.

Once we opened, I started to see Yelp differently. Especially since we were trying to be a different kind of place, and really wanted to focus on our neighborhood and neighbors. When I look at our Yelp profile, I see a different picture from what I see and feel inside the cafe. To be fair, we've gotten criticism for poor food (which helped me to tune recipes), poor service (which helped me identify and fix some personnel problems), and other faux pas that customers would have never brought to my attention otherwise. On the other hand, there's a bias toward technology folks on any online system, and folks who are (or were) angry about our laptop policy make up a good chunk of our negative reviews.

In February, I changed our Yelp profile - under wifi, it used to say 'free'. Now it says, 'don't know'. (There isn't a better option for us - 'free', 'paid' and 'don't know' are all that Yelp offers). February was our biggest month in terms of Yelp profile hits - over 1,000 for the month. Immediately after changing that configuration, Yelp hits dropped by half. I figure this is because of folks doing a Yelp search for 'free wifi'/'open now'/close to me, and seeing/not seeing us in the search results.

Today, we have a total of 8 one-star reviews, 4 of which are related to our wifi policy; we have 13 two-star reviews, of which 4 are negative about the same thing. At least one of those reviews looks like it was a person who never even set foot in the cafe. If you took those 8 reviews away, our Yelp rating would be 4.5 (or maybe even 5) stars, rather than the 4 that it is today.

Que sera, sera, I guess. I'm glad that we have loyal customers who say nice things about us, and that there's still real value in word-of-mouth. I'm glad we've gotten positive press attention, and have allies in the community, and that these things will continue to serve us for a long time. But yelp...meh.

3) my poor life balance
I went into this project with eyes open, and I'm not surprised that it's been a difficult year for me from a time-management perspective.

I started out the year working over 100 hours a week. Every hour that the cafe was open, I was here. I spent countless hours behind the counter, from morning to night. I worked and slept, and not much else. Today, I'm working more like 60 hours a week, but still don't have days off. In fact, I've had a total of less than a dozen days off all year long. This has been a strain on me, but even more so a strain on my relationship. I need to fix it.

Before we opened, I rode my bicycle over 100 miles a week, and did yoga three times a week. I was in excellent physical and mental shape. I could reliably form full and complex sentences without struggling to remember the word for 'shelf,' or 'table,' or 'door' - I said 'thing' and 'stuff' a whole lot less often. I was calm, and slept well, and had a bit of a tan, year round.

Now, I ride my bike sporadically (sometimes I can get in 100 miles in a week, but often I go a whole week without a single ride). I haven't been to yoga since the spring. I stutter a lot. I forget things. I'm pale, flabby, and 25 pounds heavier. Crap.

In the next year, I intend to get my life back into balance. Two days off every week would be awesome. Riding my bike regularly would be even better. Yoga, too. And, of course, a weekend off here and there to go out of town with my excellent girlfriend, who's been so patient with me so far. Of course, it will be hard to achieve this, but I've done harder things already, so I'm optimistic about my chances for success.

things that surprised me
1) people love us for our food
I thought we'd be primarily a coffee shop. I didn't expect for us to sell so much food. I didn't design the place to accommodate lots of cooking, and we don't have a ton of storage, so it's been a challenge for us to make the menu delicious, diverse, fresh, and a good value. We've adapted well, I think. There's still more for us to do.

Special thanks to those who helped out with menu development in the early days - Gail & Donna especially, but also everyone else who contributed little bits of advice, and employees who put together things in new ways.

It's hard to have really interesting and high-quality food in an establishment like ours. We don't have chefs, or even line cooks. Our counter staff need to be able to do everything, and the physical space makes what seems like simple things even more challenging. I'm committed to continuing to evolve based on customer needs and wants, but we'll just never be able to do all the things that even I want to.

2) so much press...
A double-edged sword, to be sure, but one that's been mostly in our favor. At the beginning, it was a lot of coverage about our bike-friendliness that got our business off the ground. Soon afterward, it was the laptop policy that got everyone writing about us. They say any publicity is good publicity, and by that yardstick, we've been wildly successful.

This is an indicator that, right or wrong, we're doing something different, and many people find it interesting. For my own part, I think the most interesting thing is what this says about the state of businesses like ours...by doing a just a couple things (putting some bike hooks on the walls and expressing opinions about laptops), we stand out. I understand that standing out is challenging, but I'm surprised that more businesses aren't more diverse, especially in a city like ours, which is full of folks who might find that interesting. I hope our example encourages others, here or elsewhere, to challenge conventional wisdom and be creative.

things i want to do better
1) attract a better cross-section of the neighborhood
Our customers are certainly local, and they're diverse, but they're not exactly entirely representative of the area. We have a couple hundred units of senior housing within a few blocks, and it's rare that we see the residents here. There are families who have lived in the area for decades, and many of them just don't come in. We primarily attract young folks, creative folks, students, teachers, young families. Most are white. I'd like to see more of my neighbors inside.

2) more interesting evenings
We've tried a lot of things this year - games nights, craft nights, happy hours, movie night, music, readings, etc. Some have been really successful - our Saturday music shows usually draw at least a few dozen people, during a time when we would otherwise be really sleepy. Our Friday Decompression Sessions just started a couple months ago, but they've already turned into a really fun, family-friendly, laid-back little gathering every week. On the other hand, games didn't work. Crafts petered out. Movies have been inconsistent.

People periodically approach me and ask whether we'd be willing to host some sort of public event. The answer is almost always, 'yes, please.' It's hard to be a neighborhood gathering spot and not be open at night, and without sustained business, we can't be. We just reduced some of our nighttime hours for the winter, but I'd rather kick off some new nighttime activities. I'm open to ideas if anyone's got them.

and finally...the party!
It's time to celebrate all we've done. I hope to see so many of the people who have made this business survive and thrive come out to celebrate with us this Friday night. If not, you have my sincere thanks. The list is too long to thank you individually, but so many of you have made contributions, large and small. This cafe is not about me, or any individual. It's about this place, this neighborhood, this city, and the people in it.

Thank you.

luvya.

-sal

our anniversary party press release...

11/29/2010

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

ACTUAL CAFE CELEBRATES ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY

WITH A JUMPING-UP-AND-DOWN, SIDEWALK-SHAKING, BOOTY-MOVING, DOWN THE CORNER YES-FEST, AND HOLIDAY GROUP ART SHOW

Actual Cafe, located at the corner of San Pablo and Alcatraz Avenues, in the tiny isthmus of North Oakland bounded by Emeryville and Berkeley, is celebrating its one-year anniversary with a party and group art show. The cafe’s neighborhood, known as the Golden Gate District, Triple Point, Oakleyville, and Paradise Park, among other names, has been undergoing a renaissance, and Actual Cafe is proud to have been a significant part of it.

“We want to say thank you to all of our friends and neighbors who have made us the place we are today, and just make a bunch of noise because it’s fun,” says owner and manager Sal Bednarz about the event.

The anniversary party will be held at Actual Cafe, 6334 San Pablo Avenue (at the corner of Alcatraz Ave) in Oakland, from 6:00-10:00pm on December 10, 2010.

The party will feature a group art show, featuring the work of many artists who have shown during the year at the cafe (Brian Richardson, Eva Silverman, Alexis Babayan, Rachel Duffy), as well as that of Lauren Aczon. The subject matter of the show will be primarily the people and places of Oakland. Because of the holiday season, many items in the show will be priced below $50, to encourage the purchase of local art for holiday gifts.

Entertainment will be provided by The Vultures and For Fear The Hearts Of Men Are Failing, two local bluegrass-and-silliness ensembles, both of whom have performed at the cafe this year. In Addition, DJs Oze, N!k, and Josh Bergman (all of whom perform at the cafe’s every-Friday-night Decompression Sessions) will be spinning excellent and eclectic records.

There will be food and drink specials, the unveiling of the new Actual Cafe t-shirt (designed by Eva Silverman of Pushcart Design), and a make-your-own-s’mores station.

Over the year, Actual Cafe has become known as a bicycle friendly East Bay destination, garnering the East Bay Bike Coalition’s Bicycle Friendly Business Award. It has also received much attention (and controversy) because of its laptop-free weekend policy. It has been awarded Alameda County Green Business certification, due to its local and sustainable practices. It was recently awarded “Best Cafe Food” in the East Bay Express Bar and Cafe Special Edition Reader’s Poll. It hosts monthly openings for local artists, weekly (and sometimes more often) shows for local musicians, fundraisers for local organizations like AIDS/Lifecycle, Girls Rock Camp, Berkeley Maynard Academy, the East Bay Free Skool, and more.

From a business standpoint, Actual Cafe has created new jobs for 17 local residents (all of whom reside within a couple miles of the cafe), and has been part of the attraction for new businesses who would not have otherwise considered moving into the area. It does its purchasing almost exclusively from local producers, including McLaughlin Coffee, Hopkins St. Bakery, Artisan Foods of Berkeley, and the Berkeley Bowl.

In the month of November, Actual Cafe was joined on San Pablo by A Verb For Keeping Warm, a fiber/yarn/spinning/knitting store, which has further contributed to the emerging neighborhood’s character. In a down economy, Actual Cafe is a shining example of local business creating economic opportunity, and its commitment to doing business locally means that most of those dollars stay in its own neighborhood.

Yeah. Why wouldn’t you come?