Coffee Shops & Snack Bars NAICS 722515

Feb 14, 2026 - Sharing Space

• Rising rents and high build‑out costs are pushing coffee shops to rethink the traditional standalone model, and many are now thriving by sharing space with other businesses, FreshCup reports. Co‑location significantly lowers financial risk by reducing rent, utilities, and maintenance costs that often make independent cafés difficult to sustain. By operating inside bike shops, bookstores, gyms, and other retailers, coffee shops gain access to built-in foot traffic and customers who linger while shopping or waiting for services. This boosts beverage sales and helps cafés build a loyal community without the overhead of a full lease. Shared spaces also allow owners to start small, test demand, and scale more sustainably. However, limited storage and operational constraints can be challenges. Overall, the co-location model offers a practical path for new and growing coffee shops to enter the market, expand their customer base, and remain viable despite rising real estate pressures.
• Drive‑thru coffee shops and snack bars may lose revenue due to outdated ground‑loop timers that provide only partial visibility into what happens in the drive-thru lane, QSR reports. Operators know when, but not why, service is slow, and timer failures can shut down lanes, an especially costly problem for businesses where drive‑thru sales often represent 50–70% of revenue. As a result, operators are shifting toward AI‑driven video intelligence that uses existing cameras to reveal bottlenecks, drive‑offs, and operational breakdowns in real time. This technology gives coffee and snack bar drive‑thrus the ability to diagnose issues like long waits, poor sequencing, or staff miscommunication, problems that quietly erode throughput and customer satisfaction. With richer data and visual context, operators can benchmark performance across locations, tighten procedures, and prevent lost sales. For high‑volume, small‑ticket drive‑thru concepts, AI visibility is becoming essential to protecting margins, improving speed, and keeping lanes consistently profitable.

• Specialty coffee shops are rethinking how they serve drip coffee, and the choices they make have direct implications for workflow, pricing, customer experience, and brand identity, Fresh Cup reports. High‑volume cafés rely on batch brewing to maintain speed and consistency while still showcasing craft through rotating single‑origin offerings. This approach keeps drip affordable and efficient, appealing to regulars who also buy whole beans. Other shops use pour‑overs to highlight variety and deepen customer engagement, adjusting methods by location, serving hand‑brewed to locals, and automated systems for tourist-heavy areas needing faster service. Destination cafés may build their entire experience around made‑to‑order brewing, using pour‑overs as a theatrical, intentional ritual that differentiates them from typical high‑volume shops. Across the industry, decisions about drip are shaping labor demands, menu strategy, and the overall atmosphere, becoming a key lever for how specialty cafés define their identity and compete.
• Starbucks’ decision to close roughly 400 stores in dense urban markets like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago signals a major shift in the competitive landscape for coffee shops, CNN reports. After decades of aggressive clustering, Starbucks now acknowledges that oversaturation and rising competition from smaller chains and independent cafés have eroded store performance. Starbucks’ retrenchment opens valuable real estate and customer share for rivals. Local specialty shops, already gaining traction in urban areas, stand to benefit from reduced Starbucks density and the brand fatigue that comes with oversaturation. Emerging chains, including Good Earth Coffeehouse, are moving into vacated locations, accelerating market diversification, according to CNN. For the broader industry, Starbucks’ pullback validates the strength of niche, craft‑oriented, and convenience‑driven competitors and underscores a shift toward more curated, differentiated coffee experiences, creating new opportunities for independents while forcing all players to sharpen their value propositions in increasingly crowded urban markets.