Well, that's the east coast though. West coast, particular the Pacific Northwest, comes with its own culture and a lot of difficulty in getting a stable crowd.

Coffee, especially currently, is one of those things that everyone has a very strong opinion about even if they can't quite articulate why they have it. Middling chain coffee houses would outperform dedicated coffee houses, despite the amenities and the quality of coffee, simply because they'd hit these three C's: Convenience, Cost, Consistency. The majority of the people want the C's - they don't particularly care about the history of the coffee, the quality of the press or the technique of the person making it. They're happy to call someone in a Starbucks apron a barista as long as coffee comes in 20 oz and with the exact extras requested.

I don't know that I'm a coffee snob, but I really did like the local place near my last work place when I worked in Tacoma, WA. The guy who owned it was just a really nice and laid back guy who made coffee I really enjoyed. His idea of a coffee house was a mixture specialty coffee with specialty beer to server the neighborhood and the campus I worked at. He wasn't a huge coffee guy, he just had a fair idea on what was good. But he wasn't interested in trying to compete with middling or larger chains; he had the vision of a coffee house and lounge that could be a nice place to help bring up the class of the neighborhood.

Regrettably his staff couldn't seem to replicate whatever it was he did and were more concerned about some of the other hallmarks of coffeehouses (the latte art, getting the right music, etc). They seemed to like the idea of being baristas in a archetypal coffeehouse, but when even a slight big of pressure hit (like of 4-5 people), they weren't really up for it. Ironically, many of my colleagues who did prefer this coffeehouse would complain if it got too much foot traffic because it would be "losing its uniqueness". It seemed almost paradoxical that the gentleman had created a really nice coffeehouse that did appeal to self-proclaimed coffee snobs and hit the right notes for a university coffeehouse; but in doing so, it would teeter on the edge of "undesirable" because it was too popular - the owner seemed cursed to either run with the image and get into a workflow he didn't want, or to be stuck with pennies of profit at the end of the month satisfying a core customer base. Without clarity on which direction to go, I think his staff faltered because each one would have a different attitude towards it. (Perhaps snobbishly of me, I too had certain baristas I preferred to make the coffee, and certain baristas where I'd just walk past if they were working that day)

I went because I liked the guy and his work and really hoped that it would help keep him going. Despite being so close to a College campus and being the only lounge style eatery in the entire area, he just couldn't seem to get a lot of foot traffic from the students at the campus or from people in the neighborhood. They either went to the campus convenience store and got the drip or button-press machine coffee, or they'd hit up one of the many drive-thru coffee stands that were getting big around that time. (The bikini stands in particular started cropping up...but I don't think those lasted long past their novelty phase)

The economics of a coffeehouse has to be just absolutely mind boggling as an owner, and to me at least, it seems like a really terrible mechanism for expressing one's own creativity, and like a money sink of a side-project. There's a lot of nuance, at least from my experiences with PNW coffeehouses, that go into making a small one successful.