Even Taylor – headlining our Anniversary Party

Three years.

Sometimes it seems like a lot less, but usually (to me) it feels like a lot longer, for both positive and not-so-positive reasons.  I feel like Actual Cafe has become a fixture of the Golden Gate neighborhood, and we’ve accomplished much of what we set out to do here.  We’ve become a friendly gathering place for neighbors.  We’re serving great coffee and food.  We’re having interesting and eclectic events (art, music, literary, and other).  We’re not constantly reinventing everything – our systems are mature, our vendors are consistent, our equipment is debugged and generally works.  While there’s always room for improvement, and while constant improvement in a food business is necessary for its long-term viability, we’re in a pretty good place.   On the other hand, it’s been a tremendous amount of work, and I have had a lot of sleepless nights, along with a lack of time off and exercise, which makes three years seem more like 10.

[We're having a party to celebrate, today (Saturday March 23) from 6-10, with live music by our friends Even Taylor and Kim Tillman, along with new folks Genevieve Wolff, Arbielle, and Lindee Hoshikawa.  Beer, cupcakes, friends, and fun.  It's what we do.]

Victory Burger interior

On the horizon, we may experiment with casual table service at the cafe during dinner and brunch.  We’re also about to embark on an overhaul of the cafe menu – now that we have a burger shop next door, we need to refocus a bit.  We want to up our food and coffee game, narrow the menu, and continue to push more and better brunch and lunch specials, while keeping our prices accessible.  We’ve made some significant strides in cafe food and coffee in the past year – we took some things away (primarily our house baking, which got replaced with more Starter Bakery items) that allowed us to better focus on what we do really well, and push that forward.  Our soups and frittatas are better, we’ve done some really great brunch specials (and delicious lunch specials as well).  I’m looking forward to retiring a few menu items, and replacing them with some new ones that I hope everyone will be even more excited about.  We also have a new (to us) espresso machine en route – it should show up shortly.  It’s a heavily modded much more modern machine than the old Elektra we’ve been making your drinks on, and it will help us extract better flavors from our coffees, experiment with other beans, and get drinks made faster to get through our morning rushes better.  All these are good things.

Our parklet has been significantly delayed (sorry about that), mostly because of poor timing.  I expected to get the parklet permit in the very early part of last year, but didn’t actually have it until summertime, when I was already pulling permits for Victory Burger construction.  The construction project consumed all the time, energy, and money that would have gone into the parklet otherwise.  So instead of having a parklet done by last summer (before we started work on VB), instead we have nothing, and no firm plan to get it done.  I’m still focused on just smoothing out the restaurant operation before I take on any new projects, so it might be a bit longer before even a plan emerges.

And unfortunately, all this new stuff has taken some wear and tear on me personally.  I haven’t had a day off in several months, have been working a lot of  12 hour days, and we’ve been getting through the Victory launch mostly through sheer force of will on my part and on the part of lots of key folks on our crew (thanks, crew! you know who you are).  I feel like we’re on the back of that part of the project now, and things are starting to get a bit more controlled and predictable (of course, that might just be temporary), but either way, it needs to get that way soon.  I’m getting married to my lovely fiancee Gail in just three months, and she’s taken on more than her fair share of wedding planning because I’ve been unable to contribute much, so I have some make-up work to get back to something more even.  Also, we’re planning a few days away right after the wedding, and I need to be able to get myself out of here for a week to get married and take that time.  Three months seems like a really short time to work that out, but it’s necessary, so I will.

Short summary:
1) this stuff ain’t easy
2) we’re hustling
3) and we’re getting at least some things right
4) but there’s (always) still more to do

Thanks to all of you who have contributed in all the ways, large or small, to getting us here.  Thanks to all our regular customers who stuck with us as we figured things out, to our neighbors who always have nice things to say, to our crew who’s busted their collective ass to the moon and back a couple times, to the performers who have made beautiful evenings, the artists who have made our walls so interesting, and even more especially Gail, who is constantly supportive of me and gives great advice all the time.

luvya (like always),
sal & the actual crew

We got our final permit and pre-construction inspection this week for our parklet, and all signs are GO!

We’ve got our friend Wendell working on a frame for the base of the parklet, and we’re hoping to have the deck built and installed in just a few weeks.  We’ve got a bunch of benches, counters, planters, bike parking, etc. to build once the deck is in place, and we’ll be doing community open builds to get them done once the frame is in place…stay tuned.

Worldwide Park(ing) Day is September 21st, and we’re hoping to have the parklet in some usable state (probably not done, but at least partly done) by then.  Exciting? Youbetcha.

If you want to keep up with news of our parklet, follow Actual Cafe Parklet on the Facebook.

The East Bay Express has named Actual Cafe Best Cafe 2012 in their annual Best of the East Bay issue!

Thanks to our crew for doing such an awesome job!
Thanks to all our customers who love us (and say so)!
Thanks to everyone who voted for us in the Express Reader’s Poll!

Not a whole lot more to say here. We’ll keep doing what we do, and hope you all will continue to love us for it.

luvya,
sal and the entire Actual crew

Hey, Arbor Cafe!

We’re so jazzed for Team Bike Challenge in May (thanks to Trumer Brauerei!), that we think we ought to create an East Bay Bike Friendly Cafe subdivision.

We challenge you to a bike-off in May. We’ll use average miles per rider as our yardstick, so it’s fair.

If you win, we’ll treat your entire crew to beers and snacks at our place. If you lose, it’s only your pride at stake.

What say you? Team Bike Challenge, ahoy!

Trumer Brauerei has challenged Actual Cafe to compete in the Team/Company Bike Challenge during bike month this year, and we’ve accepted the challenge.  Trumer has added some twists to the competition, including our Trumer sales for the month as a factor (which you can all help us out with), but we’re pretty confident we can kick their butts even without the beer sales being factored in.  Our crew is about the same size as Trumer’s (they’re 16 and we’re 18), but a large number of our employees bike to work every day, and many don’t even own cars.

Because we need to form teams of no more than five riders, and we’ll all be competing in the Team Bike Challenge as teams on top of this company challenge, I’ve offered an additional incentive of $100 cash to the winning Actual Cafe team.

I’ve spent a lot of time making Actual Cafe bike friendly, and we’ve gotten lots of props for it.  Unfortunately, my own riding has fallen off substantially since having opened the cafe, and I’m glad that Trumer has given me the excuse to get my flabby ass back out on a bike more regularly.

We’ll post updates through the course of the month of May, but you can all track our progress and the competition at youcanbikethere.com.

Game on, Trumer!

-sal

Hey, kids.

We’ve been working for a while now on our new wordpress site – I’ve spent dozens of my own hours massaging content and migrating blog posts from our old blog and art blog, creating new promotional slides for events, updating and formatting our menu for the site, and on and on.  It’s been a fairly big project, in the middle of a couple other big projects, but worth it, I think.

The new site gives us lots of capabilities that we didn’t have before: it allows us to prominently feature events and other announcements, and keep them sticky (unlike facebook, or twitter, which make it really easy to miss what’s going on if you don’t happen to be glued to your monitor).  It gives us a text version of our menu, which makes it easier to search and to update.  It brings our two blogs together in the main site content, and gives more control about how they appear.  It’s easier to modify layout and content in general.  I can create and maintain new pages without hand-coding or getting a programmer involved.  This means I can focus on things that I’m better at.  Wordpress seems like a good platform to do this, and I’m generally happy with how the site looks and functions.

The graphic design of the site still owes much to the original design done by eshutter creative, and the bulk of the wordpress migration was done by our customer, David, of colorgrooves.  Thanks to both of them for their help.

I hope you like the new site.  If you find any problems (bad links, things that just don’t look right, etc.), please let me know.

back to my day job…
-sal

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

[note: Older posts here (pre-April 2012) are copies of the originals at our old blog at blogspot. We won't be taking the old site down, but we won't be updating it either. We copied the posts to this new site so that users can see highlights from our past while we continue to evolve and write about it. We didn't copy everything from the old blog, but you're always free to hop over and check it out for yourself.]

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!

[note: Older posts here (pre-April 2012) are copies of the originals at our old blog at blogspot. We won't be taking the old site down, but we won't be updating it either. We copied the posts to this new site so that users can see highlights from our past while we continue to evolve and write about it. We didn't copy everything from the old blog, but you're always free to hop over and check it out for yourself.]

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

[note: Older posts here (pre-April 2012) are copies of the originals at our old blog at blogspot. We won't be taking the old site down, but we won't be updating it either. We copied the posts to this new site so that users can see highlights from our past while we continue to evolve and write about it. We didn't copy everything from the old blog, but you're always free to hop over and check it out for yourself.]

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