The authentic Italian café is quaint. I’m not talking about the touristy “Italian type” shop that costs three euro for a cappuccino and makes drinks to go. I’m talking about the small family owned shop that has delicious fresh croissants and cappuccinos that speak very poor English and make you pay after you eat.

The Italian way of having breakfast.

As a business minded person and a lover of coffee I am fascinated by this concept because in any service industry business it is difficult to make money and Italian coffee shops seem to have it figured out.

Every morning my friends and I go to the same little café and pay one euro cappuccino and a euro 20 cents for a croissant.

One cappuccino in the United States is minimum three dollars, that’s if you’re someplace cheap.

Italian café’s stay open all day, they are a café in the morning, they serve sandwiches and lunch in the afternoon, this thing called apertivo in the early evening which is where you buy one drink and they have appetizer type food like bruschetta (I’ve been to some apertivo that have like pasta and meat dishes) it’s an all you can eat appetizer buffet. Then these café’s turn into bars or local hangouts and serve drinks with music and sometimes even dinner.

They do it all.

The thing is I’m not quite sure how. If you’re open all day that means you have to staff your shop all day every day. They probably have a good amount of employees and that costs money. They have to stock their shops with fresh baked goods and fresh food every single day. Not to mention they have every kind of alcohol you can think of.

So how do they do it?

My roommate and I dove into a few different theories.

The first one is that most Italians have a favorite spot, they’ll go their multiple times a day. Often they’ll grab their cappuccino and croissant and come back for lunch and after work drinks. The café may not be making any money specifically on breakfast but throughout the day they make that money back, and more.

The next is that croissants and cappuccinos are very cheap to make, so the café’s are making a good profit margin off of charging one euro for a croissant. They often outsource the baked goods and buy them in bulk every morning from local bakeries which can’t cost much when the bakeries are making hundreds of croissants every morning.

The third is that the Italian lifestyle isn’t all about making money like it is in the United States. Maybe these café owners aren’t money driven, they love what they do and are loving comfortably so they don’t worry so much about making maximum profit off of their stores.

I am convinced they must make a lot of money off of their alcoholic beverages, Italians love to socialize over an Aperol Spritz and a bottle of wine. Since alcohol doesn’t go bad perhaps they sell a lot of drinks in the evening that account for money lost on breakfast.

In 2017 Starbucks will be opening its first Italian location in the heart of Milan and I am curious to see how it does.

Starbucks started as a store for the purchasing of high-quality coffee beans until Howard Schultz went to a café in Milan and decided they should start selling drinks. Now about 45 years later they are returning to Milan and trying to make money in the Italian market.

I personally think this is a huge mistake, the idea for Starbucks started in Milan because of Italian café’s and then it took off in the United States because we had nothing like it. Italians are not going to pay five euros for an American coffee when they can walk onto any street and pay one euro for a cappuccino. Perhaps it will kick off for tourists but it confuses me why you would come all the way to Italy and not go to an authentic Italian café. Why bother travelling.

Regardless, it is happening and I am fascinated to see how it does.