The fifth coffee shop

There is a street in Riyadh with four coffee shops on it, and a fifth is fitting out behind paper on the windows.

I do not need to see the concept to guess most of it. Pale wood, a roastery reference, a filter option on the board, a house drink with something in it, a sign in Arabic and English, and a drive-through lane if the plot allows one, because the heat has arrived and in a few weeks nobody sits outside for a photograph.

All of it is the entry ticket to that street, bought already by the four shops that are open. None of it is a decision.

What is left to decide is who. The office block at the end of the street wants a queue that clears in four minutes and a card reader that works, at eight and at two. The families in the buildings behind want a room where children are not a problem and a table that is not occupied by a laptop for three hours. The people who come out after ten want somewhere still serving at midnight, and will drive past two of the four to get it.

A fifth shop can be the best on the street at one of those and let the other four keep everybody else.

I have watched a great many operators answer this with everyone. A long menu, every daypart, a brunch and a late night and a study corner, the budget spread evenly across all of it. It reads as ambition. On a street that is already served it is the one choice that guarantees fifth place, because the only thing a fifth arrival can offer that the others cannot is being obviously for somebody.

Narrow is not the compromise here. Narrow is what is left.