Dive into your books and look at what brings the most money in the door: the shopping or the coffee/sandwiches? Pick a business. Are you a plant shop that offers coffee to entice customers through the door, or are you a coffee shop with a few plants for sale in your under used space?

Second: what takes up the most square footage? Your display and shopping items, your seating space, your kitchen/prep space, some 4th thing? Looking at your books, does it make sense to devote that large/small portion of your limited square footage to each aspect?

Third: after you dive into your books, and it turns out you’re a coffee shop first and foremost, do you have any way to track those customers’ behavior? Do they browse? Do they sit and chat? Do they immediately leave after getting their coffee? Do you need to try and shift your customer’s behavior more? For example, do the customers that browse spend more time in the shop and spend more money than the ones that sit and hang out? Does it seem like the people that take a seat end up camping out for too long without spending more money? Look into your customer’s behaviors and motivations and lean into it.

Finally, my own personal opinion: novelty coffee shops that devote more space to shopping compared with seating always seem to struggle. They do well with foot traffic, especially tourist traffic during big tourist weekends or holidays, but don’t seem to do well with locals. They have trouble with consistent revenue, especially on weekdays, because people (especially locals) don’t go in to these types or shops just to grab a quick coffee or to meet up with a friend. Locals will come in for an “experience” such as a themed day or an event, but they won’t regularly go in for their morning cup of joe.

Do you find that certain days are slower than others? You mentioned weekdays are slow. Are they so slow that it doesn’t make sense to turn up the heat and have an employee present? If it makes sense from an employee retention standpoint, you might consider only being open Thursday through Sunday or something like that.

Entrepreneurship is good for society, but statistically bad for the entrepreneur.

The vast majority of small businesses fail. The risk is very great to the individual entrepreneur, kind of like playing the lottery. However small businesses drive roughly 50% of the US’s economy, employe roughly half of the workers in the US, and have come up with the majority of innovations over the last century. So it is good for society if entrepreneurs keep taking risks, even if statistically speaking, the entrepreneur is far more likely to fail than succeed.