The Turkish Coffee Syndrome | Hacker News Reader

The Turkish Coffee Syndrome

deadprogrammer.com

77 pointsjcater72 comments

TL;DR: a Turkish fast food point stopped serving [Turkish] coffee, because coffee drinkers tend to linger, buying only one cup.

Business reasons can outweigh technical considerations. Some things are not done not because it's hard to do, but because it does not make business sense. (Thank you, capt'n!)

I'm not sure the dismissal as obvious is warranted. Yes, it's obvious once you break it down into those terms, but you're waving away the part that's not so obvious: that offering a product that's easy to make and patrons want can be economically disadvantageous enough for a business to decide not to offer it. You've filed that under "business reasons", but the specific business reason is the whole point.

Still, it seems to me like this shows a severe lack of creativity on the part of the business. A smarter way to do it would be to offer the Turkish coffee alone at an outrageous price that would deter people from ordering it and sitting around. Then you offer a deal where it's reasonably priced if ordered with a meal. That way 90% of the customers you want are happy, and the customers that take up tables for hours go elsewhere.

See also: "Please take my money. Why won't you let me give you money for this thing I want you to sell me?"

In this instance, I'm not sure raising the price even solves the problem. You'll just get old men ordering meals and pushing the food around their plate for hours.

> I'm not sure raising the price even solves the problem.

Priced correctly, it should. if coffee buyers sit around long enough to deny a second ground of customers a table to sit at, the appropriate price for a coffee could be something like, the original price of the coffee + the average amount earned from a single group of customers. for example if the coffee original costs $5, and the typical table holds 2 persons earning you about $7 each, then the appropriate price for a coffee (unbundled) is maybe $19.

if someone decides that $20 coffee is worth it, then it makes no difference to you that you sold him the coffee and let him sit around for an hour without another table of customers coming in. if not, he will not be there, and you could now host another table of paying customers.

Some people ordering coffee aren't going to sit around for a lot more. So the nominal cost of coffee would be the price where offering coffee or not offering coffee yield the same profit and we can't really tell where that is. On the other hand, maybe having expensive coffee on the menu will impact other buying decisions people make, it's perfectly possible that coffee at any price will have a negative impact on profit. It's not a simple question of supply and demand because of the mix and crosstalk.

Well tedunangst's point, which is worth considering, is that the customers who hang around will bypass the whole raised price scheme by ordering an actual meal and getting the discounted price.

But that's still avoidable by having the discount structured so that you just can't get a Turkish coffee without paying some minimum amount, determined by trial and error to make it nonviable for retirees to purchase and then sit around all day.

With that scheme, however, it becomes more complicated to work out what price makes it worth it for them to actually just sit around, because you also have to factor in the cost of the food they're wasting.

Substitute "Turkish Coffee" with "Game of Thrones" on this whole comment thread, and maybe we'll learn a bit about the thought process at HBO.

It'll take some doing to construct a reason why people downloading a single tv episode are analogous to old men hogging a table though...

Does an article of only a few hundred words warrant a summary?

The twitter mentality illustrated.

When I was showing my wife around Stockholm, it started pouring down, and we quickly went into a small coffee shop on a touristy street. I tried to buy a coffee ($5 mind you) and they wouldn't let me. Not without buying something else as well. Now I can understand that it makes economical sense for them, since they had few seats and it was a busy location, but that experience was just hugely off-putting to me. I will never go back there.

I call it... the Stockholm Syndrome.

I see what you did there ;)

I've recently started making Turkish coffee every morning at home (thanks Turkish GF for introducing it to me!). I like it. It's stronger than regular coffee and you drink it like espresso. The big difference is that you don't strain it through a filter; the grounds end up at the bottom of the cup.

The preparation is much more time-consuming than traditional coffee, which I think is the other half of the phenomenon mentioned. You can really only make 4-5 demitasse cups at a time, and it takes 10-15 minutes of actively watching and stirring the cup. Compare this to brew coffee or espresso drinks which take 30 seconds to 2 minutes, tops. So, it's not surprising that Turkish restaurants, whilst adapting to a fast-paced Western capitalist model, lose motivation for going through the whole process.

Why does it take 10-15 minutes to make Turkish coffee? It takes about 2 minutes to make the kind of turkish coffee we drink here in Slovenia ...

Unless you're roasting your own beans, but that's supposed to take hours, not 15 minutes.

The water should be on low-medium heat, which by necessity takes a little while to get to a boil. High heat will get it done in 2 minutes, but the grounds won't mix as well and it sometimes will be burnt-tasting.

For reference, here is how I was taught to make it:

1. Put water in cezve equal to number of cups you'd like

2. Put cezve on stove at low-medium heat

3. Add in one teaspoon of coffee per cup

4. Add in sugar (if desired)

5. Keep on low heat until foam and small bubbles appear.

6. Pour a little bit of coffee into each cup, then return to heat. Repeat 2-3x until cups are full.

7. Let each cup sit for a minute to let the grounds settle.

8. Enjoy!

Ah, that's probably why we usually add the coffee when water is done boiling. Then bring it to a boil one more time. Or up to four times, depending on taste.

shrug Still won't take 10 minutes even if you're boiling slowly at low heat. Unless you're making a super large pot, but making more than two turkish coffees at once is far out. 2 is the number you shall make.

Your description sounds a little different than how we make it. Guess the recipe changed in the ~1000km journey up to us.

It takes like 5 minutes on average, it's not 10-15 but it's not 2-3 minutes either. And the machine makes it in 3 to 4 minutes.

The source is my mom, who is, like me, a native Turkish person, who just made the coffee I'm drinking now. :)

making more than two turkish coffees at once is far out. 2 is the number you shall make.

The conversation started about restaurants - it doesn't seem outlandish to expect restaurants to deal with more than two people at once.

You're supposed to use separate cezvas. If you're doing it absolutely properly then its' one cezva per patron. That's how my grandmother used to do it when she owned a restaurant. Still has a dozen of those tiny things laying around.

A more practical way is to wait for the water to boil, then pour out some of the water into a cup (which you will put back afterwards). This way there is more room for the coffee to rise and not overflow. Then put coffee in and bring to boil several times. The surface should rise but not separate. Some people even remove the foam altogether to remove the bitterness.

Random non-productive trivia;

There's a Turkish tradition that when you meet your girlfriends family with the intention of having their blessing to marry her, she makes coffee but puts (a lot of) salt instead of that sugar in step 4. (Only into your cup)

You are supposed to drink that without complaining. I'm not sure how or why this thing lives on.

Source: Turkish.

Neat. This is what Wikipedia has to say:

"For the groom's coffee, the bride-to-be sometimes uses salt instead of sugar to gauge his character. If the bridegroom drinks his coffee without any sign of displeasure, the bride-to-be assumes that the groom is good-tempered and patient. Indeed, as the groom already comes as the demanding party to the girl's house, in fact it is the boy who is passing an exam and etiquette requires him to receive with all smiles this particular present from the girl, although in some parts of the country this may be considered as a lack of desire on the part of the girl for marriage with that candidate."

Actually, roasting (from green -> finished) takes ~15 minutes commercially, and when I looked up "tradtional turkish coffee roasting"[1], the first useable link said up to ~20 mins (roasted in an oven).

Is there a traditional method that takes hours ?

-bch (commercial roaster in a former life)

[1] http://turkishcook.com/turkish-coffee-roasting/

Sounds like cowboy coffee to me, except for which container you settle the grounds in.

The preparation method is vaguely similar (heat the grounds in the water), but it differs in the fineness of the grind, which makes a substantial difference. Cowboy coffee uses a coarse grind, roughly like the grounds you'd use to make filter coffee, while Turkish coffee uses coffee ground to a powder, similar to the consistency of cocoa powder. This results in some of it staying suspended in solution, and the rest settling into a sludge.

Fwiw there are also machines that do it now, though purists disdain them. They are rare in homes (unlike espresso machines in Italy), but many commercial establishments in Turkey, the Balkans, and the Middle East will use the machine by default, if you don't inquire. In Greece there's probably a 50-60% chance of it being a machine nowadays, if you order at a restaurant or bakery and don't specifically ask if it's made in a briki. As is often the case, the solution to adapting to fast-paced capitalism seems to be automation.

I wonder if the disdain is for the idea of machine made Turkish coffee, or because there's some factor creating variance in the bubbling times for which the machines aren't compensating.

There's a HUGE culture behind Turkish(/Greek) coffee, and tons of details on making it.

A better machine could mimic the technical part (not that anybody makes them like that currently), but the very idea of a machine making it is against the whole philosophy of drinking it.

It's like making love to a plastic doll.

I agree as far as the ritual of making it in homes goes, but in a restaurant using a machine doesn't bug me much. Even when the coffee is made in a briki/cezve, at a larger store it'll be in a big assembly-line process in the kitchen, which doesn't really capture much mystique for me, and isn't visible to me anyway: all I see is that some coffee comes out a bit after I order it. So in that case it's just as well, to me, if a machine does it, as long as the quality is the same.

>I agree as far as the ritual of making it in homes goes, but in a restaurant using a machine doesn't bug me much.

For a larger store sure, it doesn't make much difference.

But the traditional way was at small coffee shops (kafenes) where people would see for hours, smoke shisha etc. Usually with a sand based stove (hovoli) etc.

I like this fix. People don't realize that loitering in restaurants (particularly by teenagers and retirees) is a huge problem and reduces business. Restaurants frequently lobby together to get loitering laws passed to deal with it.

I used to live in a neighborhood with an abundance of retirement homes and a dearth of restaurants. The two that were open and had decent hours were _always_ filled with old people sitting for hours talking and reading the paper. Often they were borderline-homeless/smelly and they would get into fights. It was incredibly frustrating to want to get food and not have a place to sit. Because this restaurant was part of a chain and had policies to follow, there wasn't really anything they could do to alleviate the situation.

My only option to eat was basically to take the subway out of the neighborhood or walk significantly out of my way.

I don't think any business should be forced to serve customers that are a drain on their revenue. Other options like selectively serving coffee could trigger a costly discrimination suit.

tl;dr: old, table-bogarting assholes are ruining delicious Turkish coffee for everyone and there isn't really anything that can be done about it.

It seems that what they need isn't new laws, but removal of whatever law prevents them from putting time limits on their tables.

But maybe what prevents them from doing this is a very general law that they need a special exception from, and hence a "loitering law".

Your parent comment specifically says this:

> Because this restaurant was part of a chain and had policies to follow, there wasn't really anything they could do to alleviate the situation.

So it seems the situation is something like "a McDonald's franchise owner has a big problem with oldsters filling his seats and inhibiting revenue. As a condition of the McDonald's franchise, he's not allowed to kick patrons out, because though that's great for his revenue the PR is bad enough that it's a revenue loss for headquarters. So he lobbies the local government, which doesn't oversee McDonald's-the-international-company, to pass loitering laws such that he's able to get rid of the oldsters."

I don't think the hypothetical guy would have much luck making the case to the IP holder that he needs to build some ill will for the brand.

Right. Actually I think McDonald's allows their restaurants to enforce a 20 minute loitering policy. I've seen the signs clearly posted in many of them.

The problem for restaurants is that they're serving the general public. While they're private property, the seating areas inside are considered, for the most part, a public space. While you can refuse people service, you can't do it for any reason that is discriminatory (in the ways that are constitutionally protected plus a few others). If you required a membership, there's implied exclusivity and you can deny anyone you want -- even for discriminatory reasons. This protects businesses like night clubs and the Boy Scouts.

If you start throwing out old people who ordered coffee, you're basically asking for a discrimination suit...unless you have a clearly posted sign stating a policy that is enforced for everyone.

I'd really like to live in a world where serving your local community, as these restaurants clearly were, is more important than maximizing profits to the detriment of your community.

Oh well.

...what.

There were two restaurants in the community. If it had been possible to make a profit, more restaurants could have been run and they would have served the community too. The primary complaint in the comment was not, y'know, some balance sheet isn't high enough, but that this person had no where to eat out because it was impossible to run a restaurant without losing money.

Yep.

I often couldn't eat at these places because all of the tables were taken up by people not there to eat; either retirees with nowhere else to go or people wanting to sit inside while waiting for the bus.

It just strikes me as odd, sometimes, that teenagers and retirees looking for a place to spend their time among friends in reasonable comfort, despite their limited income, are treated as parasites on the community; inherently less deserving to be allowed out in public than someone who has money to prove their humanity.

And then we wonder why there's juvenile delinquency.

Never mind, I'm just being unreasonably idealistic again.

If I were them I'd just raise the prices. Or pull it off the menu until the old folks migrated then put it back. Or just serve it to people who are eating and ask for it specifically. There are at least 10 solutions that don't leave money on the table.

I agree with every point you make. But I bet reality has counters for them all. In line with the author, I've found that inexplicable behavior may result from stupidity or ignorance, but much more often there is something you don't know.

You might be right. I'm not 100% sure what the solution is. But I am sure it's not telling someone "no I won't sell you the high markup item you want".

I bet having coffee on the menu for some exorbitant price would piss people off more than its apparently inexplicable absence

A/B testing would have gotten the same result, if they'd optimized revenue/table across menu variations. In fact, A/B testing on websites does frequently enhance dark patterns.

To be extra literal:

Café 220

   220 Univ Ave, Palo Alto

Has Turkish coffee and you won't be rushed out the door.

Also usually comps tea if you order something for dine-in.

Veggie mousaka and falafel wraps FTW.

(Gotta plug my friends, after all.)

Usually, after a cup of Turkish coffee, follows a session of "coffee fortune-telling"[0]. The residuum of coffee in the cup is reviewed to make estimations on the future. Living in Istanbul, Turkey, I've seen and heard of a lot of places that make a business out of coffee fortune-telling. Maybe this would help shopkeepers abroad gain some income from Turkish coffee and not stop serving it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasseography -- Also referred to as "coffee reading".

edit: added wikipedia page.

Where I live this problem is solved by raising prices, so you can't find coffee for less than 5$ in busy places.

But if for some reason business is averse to raising prices, weird schemes materialize.

Where I live there are groups of old men who come to the coffee shops in the evenings and buy one cup of coffee, then sit around bullshitting and playing cards for hours. If this business is facing a similar problem, then raising the price of a cup of coffee to $5 simply won't cut it.

Then again -- I know a lot of businesses despise these customers, but these are the guys who will be there night after night, rain or shine. Your typical customer comes by how often? Once every month or two? It's worthwhile to put up with them if they're not causing you to lose other business.

Opportunity - segment the market: keep restaurant as is, organize a self-supporting social club for the coffee drinkers & card players nearby, upstairs, or next door, serve coffee, take-out pastries, etc. to club-goers. Details, regulations, ymmv.

I maybe naive, but I see an opportunity for a Turkish coffee stand.

Nobody stands while drinking Turkish coffee. :) But seriously, it's a social drink, which is why it will (or should) never be served in a paper cup. But being originally from a Balkan state myself, I may have a bias against "to go" coffee.

I feel like a real Turkish coffee establishment where you could hang out, chat, and play backgammon could be one of those "slow" things that people like (slow as in slow food). Especially if it was a "no laptops allowed" type of establishment. Just to connect and have real conversations and socialization.

This is me at my most idealistic. :)

No one is arguing that this isn't a good thing. The whole point of the article is that sometimes you cannot have good things. Such an establishment cannot survive (cover costs and liveable wages) in a place with high rent.

Sounds like a bubble tea store with tables, chairs, board games and maybe a few sofas. (they exist)

Frankly these types of places have all of my understanding but none of my respect. Outside of Turkey the coffee would probably be part of the core allure of a Turkish restaurant. The irony being that coffee and tea are often complimentary after meals at many restaurants in Turkey. Its sort of a betrayal when the social aspect is supposed to be part of the package given that people in Turkey spend long hours at the dinner table, talking. Is there a legal issue that prevents them from only serving coffee with a meal? And then the thought that old folks spend part of their day walking around trying to figure out where they can sit down and talk is all kind of depressing. This seems like a poor fix, but hey, talk is cheap.

Problem could be easily solved by simply requiring a meal order for coffee, although perhaps they were afraid they'd anger the other patrons. Still, margins on coffee can be quite high.

Or just offering coffee before or at the end of each meal. Factor the price in your menu for large entrees. People like free stuff.

Charge rent. Serve free coffee.

Like a co-working space?

Corollary: Beware of unintended business ramifications when doing a code rewrite (i.e. putting coffee back on the menu might cause revenue per table to drop).

They should just rent out table space per minute independently of the cost of meal itself.

sort of the 'internet cafe' model with refreshments. If you wanted to go for the 'uber' crowd, you could adjust your prices based on demand.

I don't know about the adjusting price on demand (there is a lot of advantage to fixed and predictable prices) but I do think it is a model that could possibly work.

Without demand pricing, you would also need some hook to 'bootstrap' I mean, you aren't going to pay money to go hang out in an empty building - maybe good free coffee? that would be a cheap hook that would work, at least for me.

This would also likely work in a place where there aren't good regular coffee houses. I imagine a 'pay by the hour' place would have a hard time existing next to, say, red rock in mountain view.

The other problem I see is actually collecting the money; if you charge people per-drink, they pay you when they get another drink. If you charge per hour, you've gotta have someone monitoring, or hand out hardware that tracks the customer.

I do like the model, though. You can emphasize the social, you know, like a nightclub, only with the more intellectual connotations of the cafe.

my comment wasn't 100% serious, more poking fun at my disciplines tendency to advocate "markets for everything". However maybe it won't be too long before all kinds of social venues don't charge by the hour.

It seems like even the low tech solution of time limits is not viable for these places, so they resort to the simpler solution of taking coffee off the menu.

I thought restaurants make more money from drinks (and deserts) than actual meals.

Probably, but if someone sits at a table for hours and only buys one cup over all those hours other sales will most likely be lost if the place is full of those 1-cupers.

They could have raised the price of coffee instead of eliminating it.

I was about to post the same. Maybe $25.

one simply does not drink turkish coffee at fast food place.

Turks do love their coffee, it's their second religion :-)

You can buy the wares http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_coffee in ethnic stores, Turkish, Middle Eastern or even Eastern European stores (many were occupied by the Turks for quite a few centuries.) As for coffee, just ask a good online store to grind it at #0 for Turkish style. Grinders at supermarket do not work as well. The coffee loses its freshness a bit so the first few days but it's still very good.

Most Turkish coffee drinkers are either from Turkey, Middle east or Eastern /Southern Europe, or people that generally speaking do take their time so I understand why restaurants are pissed at them.

This isn't a great analogy, because the absence of Turkish coffee isn't a case of malice. They have to degrade service (i.e. take the coffee off the menu) in that way in order to survive. It's not malicious for a business to do things that are slightly shitty but necessary in order to stay alive.

On the other hand, there are a lot of cases where bad code and processes are a result of, if rarely malice, intentional and socially negative behaviors (that aren't justified by a need for survival). "Launch and flee" is often intentional.

I think you're taking an overly-narrow definition of "malice". At least in the context of Hanlon's Razor, "malice" typically includes stances that might be more specifically described as "short-term thinking" and/or "apathy". The point is really just to contrast it with "stupidity".

But that's not the reason. The most frustrating part of bad code isn't that it's bad, it's that writing better code pays off even in the short term. Tests often earn their keep before you've even finished the feature they're testing, as do more basic things like sensible variable names. We're not talking about pragmatic sacrifices for business reasons; that can lead to well-written code that doesn't scale or makes dubious assumptions about its data. But plain unreadable code is never the result of anything except ignorance.

I think you commented on the wrong article.

no, the analogy just went way over your head

EDIT: On re-reading I have no idea if that post was actually directed at this article or not. I was just making the joke because it looks like any post about code might be a metaphor for any article if you think hard enough.

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