The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Coffee shops helping to give customers a lift in lockdown
Cafes have still largely been able to do what they do best throughout the pandemic, which is serve coffee.
But many have found that they’ve become so much more than just a coffee shop during a year in lockdown.
We have spoken to three coffee shops about their experience over the past 12 months of Covid-19 and how they have become a beacon of hope for many customers in their local communities.
Rebecca Braid, Roasting Project
Comfortably nestled in Burntisland’s High Street, coffee shop The Roasting Project is the brainchild of owner Rebecca Braid, who opened the shop in November 2018.
Being fortunate enough to have the means to open a pop-up takeway service in the entranceway of the shop during this most recent lockdown, Rebecca and her team have been able to serve customers for the majority of the past 12 months.
She said: “It has been an emotional rollercoaster.
“We’re a newish business as we only opened in November 2018 as a roastery.
“There are people who’ve been coming into the coffee house for years and you don’t have a minute to find out anything about them because it’s usually busy.
“But throughout
The this lockdown I’ve learned quite a lot about people and it’s been very interesting.”
Serving outside her shop on Wednesdays and Saturdays, Rebecca has learned a lot about the customers she meets regularly and how her coffees have become part of their regular routine.
She continues: “We do have a few regulars.
“For most of them I don’t even know their names, it’s just that you see them every week and they end up having a chat.
“There’s a lady who has been coming regularly and I don’t know what her circumstances are but she came up to Burntisland for a week to stay with her parents and her whole is in London.
“She came up with a week’s worth of stuff during the first lockdown, and she’s still here!
“Every time I see her we always have a laugh about what she’s got on because she still only has that week’s worth of clothes.”
Other customers who used to visit the coffee house regularly haven’t been during lockdown, so Rebecca has found creative ways to make sure they are all right.
She adds: “We used to have this wee old man, I think in his 80s, that comes into the cafe and would sit on his own. He sadly lost his wife this year. life
“When we’re really busy he’d say he didn’t need a table but we’d insist he has one.
“We have an old school desk that we use for our roasting – when he came in he liked that to be set up in a certain space in the coffee house and he sits there with his iced yumyum and a cup of tea.
“I hadn’t seen him in a while. I got these iced yumyums in from Fisher and Donaldson that he used to like, and I put a post on Instagram with a picture of him as we’d taken one a few months ago when he’d been in one morning.
“I put a post up saying, ‘If anyone knows this man, please tell him we have iced yumyums’ – and the next day he came!”
Rebecca is also one of the many cafe owners who have taken on the burden of worrying about regular customers who they know live on their own or are regarded as potentially vulnerable.
She says: “We’re not just providing a cup of coffee – it’s so much more than that and it really is a conversation or a smile.”
Andrew Scott, Heaven Scent and Heavens Above coffee shops
Along the road in Kinross-shire, owner of both Heaven Scent and Heavens Above coffee shops in Milnathort,
“We’re not just providing a cup of coffee – it’s so much more than that and it really is a conversation or a smile
“And that feedback from customers certainly keeps you going
Andrew Scott has felt that his business has become a part of the community during lockdown.
He says: “The coffee shop is properly part of the community. If you could go to the cafe with your mum, your brother, a date or a business meeting and it feels non-intrusive then it sort of ticks the box for everybody.
“So lockdown’s been really interesting because there have been a huge number of people who’ve come in and said, ‘Thank God you’re here, it’s a slice of what used to be and like we can see light at the end of the tunnel’.
“Financially, we’d have been better off being closed and we’d money.
“But my mindset was that for every day we are open, yes we will lose more money, but we’re reminding people that we’re still there.
“We’re giving people that little sort of ember of encouragement and hopefully they will start to support us again as time goes on.”
Similarly to Rebecca, Andrew has been looking out for his customers.
He adds: “We also have regulars who, if they haven’t been in any of those four days, we will call or text to ask where they are and if they are OK.
“Between lockdown one and two, and two and three have lost less we had a lot of potential food wastage.
“So we turned those into sandwiches and donated stuff to local food banks, gave stuff to local care homes, just looking after the fellow man.”
Barry Thomson, Pacamara
In Dundee, one of the few hospitality businesses on the city’s bustling Perth Road to have remained open for a number of months is Pacamara, owned by Barry Thomson.
He said that when they reopened after the first lockdown in the summer, customers were grateful to have a sense of normality.
“It took us a couple of weeks to make the plans to reopen but from the time we decided to reopen to the time we actually did reopen, it felt very right.
“The reaction we got from customers when we reopened was really pleasantly surprising. It was nice and very encouraging.”
He added: “People have had so many of the things they took for granted – freedoms – taken away from them, and, I feel anyway, one of the very few normal things that people have been able to do is get out.
“Something just as simple as having a wander, getting a coffee and having a bit of a chat.”
Managing to stay open throughout most of the recent lockdown and in the summer, Barry says he feels that they are providing a service at Pacamara.
He added: “It has been nice for us to feel like we’ve been able to contribute in that way.
“The feedback from customers has been that they’re so, so grateful we’ve decided to open this time and it’s been really nice.
“We’ve been open eight years now and I can’t remember a time remotely as challenging as this.
“And that feedback from customers certainly keeps you going when you’re having those really tough days.”