“What is that, and where is that?” Xiaoyang Long ’12 said, when asked about the cafe.
Long is not alone. The lack of visibility has been one of the main challenges faced by the Taproom Cafe, a student agency that sells hot drinks and snacks, during its first four months of operation.
From 8 p.m. until midnight this Wednesday, not a single student entered the cafe.
“We’re in Campus Club, in the basement, in the back corner,” said Zach Zimmerman ’10, a barista at the cafe. “To know about us is one thing, and you have to make the trek down here.”
For the time being, Zimmerman noted, the cafe is “a low-key, quiet place to make a few dollars.”
Ming Loong Chng ’12, the cafe’s student manager, said the cafe began to offer free coffee during midterms week in the fall semester as “an advertising strategy.”
“Now we give away around 60 to 100 cups a day,” Chng said, though he added that few students actually walk downstairs to the Cafe.
Chng stepped into his position when the previous student manager resigned after Intersession earlier this month.
Sean Weaver, the director of Princeton Student Agencies, which funds all student agency start-ups, said in an e-mail that Chng “made adjustments to the original business plan.”
Chng explained that he saw “that a lot of things could be improved in terms of how we manage the staff, to make sure the cafe opens on time and the employees are there on time.”
To run the cafe more efficiently, Chng said he instituted staffing changes and “streamlined behind-the-scenes processes.” The cafe also began accepting other forms of payment besides cash.
Damjan Korac ’12 said that when he visited the cafe a few months ago, he saw no reason to purchase drinks from the Taproom Cafe instead of from Witherspoon’s in Frist Campus Center, “because the prices seemed roughly the same.”
But, Chng noted, the cafe has made changes in its beverage menu, offering one standard drink size instead of three and readjusting its prices.
“If you really compare with Witherspoon’s, ours should be the lowest [price] for the size,” Chng explained.
This week, the cafe also added non-beverage items such as popcorn, freshly baked cinnamon rolls and other snack items to its menu.
The expanded menu is part of an effort to “create a special segment where students can buy snacks at cheaper prices,” Chng said, noting that the items like cinnamon rolls are not available at other locations on campus.
The cafe also plans to begin sponsoring a regular movie night.
“We are open to ideas from the students on what they’d like to see,” he said.
Both Chng and Weaver declined to comment on the cafe’s profits.
“It’s really not possible to determine the profitability of an agency when it has only been in operation for a little over four months,” Weaver said.
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