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Coffee-selling teens causing a buzz in New York


Cassie BendelFiled under: Baristas by Cassie Bendel

Some entrepreneurial New York City students have started a café with the aim of learning about business and a California coffee stand feels right at home on the beach.

A group of New York City teens recently opened a café on Manhattan’s Fulton Street and they’re quickly learning what it takes to fuel up the city that never sleeps.

The coffee shop is called Cafeazy and it’s run by nine students between the ages of 13 and 18. The group started with just $1,000 and now share the responsibilities of cleaning, serving, selling, and marketing their fledgling business on the cutthroat streets of the Big Apple.

The shop is the brainchild of New York couple Pam and JC Chmiel. They offer a summer course to local, high-school age students to teach them what it means to run a business. The store is the end result of two weeks of classes that focused on brainstorming, planning menus, choosing décor, and ordering supplies to keep the café working.

“It was amazing to start a business in two weeks,” Sarah Fine, a 13-year old who took part in the project, told the New York Daily News. “I now know it’s possible to start a business. It’s a challenge but I hope it’s a challenge I can achieve.”

Mrs. Chmiel said she wanted to start the class to teach kids business skills they wouldn’t normally learn in school. She also reported that the students have already made back their original $1,000 investment.

Would like you like a side of sunscreen with that?

I’m not exactly sure what this next group is learning, but I’m sure it’s something. A study in human behavior? Maybe.

A new drive-thru coffee shop just blocks from the beach in Torrance, California, serves up some hotness even when the drinks are on ice. That’s because the shop’s baristas all wear bikinis.

Appropriately called Bikini Espresso, the flower lei and surfboard-festooned shop employs young women who pull shots and serve smoothies while looking like something off of the pages of Sports Illustrated. The shop has only been open for a few days and has already seen customers from all walks of life.

“It has been a lot of fun,” barista Chelsea Turnbo told KABC-TV in Los Angeles. “The customers here are all very different. We have old ladies all the way to young men. They have all been very sweet and very supportive. It has been a lot of fun.”

Bikini Espresso isn’t the first of its kind. The idea of girls serving cappuccinos and lattes in lingerie or bikinis has been popular in the Seattle area for some time. There, you can find websites devoted to tracking down shops with names like Cowgirls Espresso or Natté Latté. And yet still there’s this.

I guess I expected to be a little offended by the ladies of Bikini Espresso when I came across the story, mostly thinking it would be yet another tale of a topless espresso bar. But in this setting, just blocks from the sand and surf, it’s not entirely inappropriate.

Let’s just hope none of those ladies has a tendency to spill hot liquids. Ouch!


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