[Closed] I just don't get this (cereal cafe content)

I'm starting to think think that moronic beyond comprehension might not be the best way to describe the action.

No one (here) is arguing that inequality is a good thing (I hope), but attacking a symptom whilst completely ignoring the cause is moronic.

It's not as if inequality is suddenly a new thing, it's been increasing rapidly since the 1970s.

If you want to know more, plenty of sources eg: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Cost-Inequality-Stewart-Lansley/dp/1908096292

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So it seems that the REAL issue here is the price of the cereal.

Presumably £1.50 would be fine, but clearly £3.50 is too much. What should the National Cereal Tariff be set at to appease the pitchfork crew?

WTF is a chi chi shop, incidentally? Is someone selling pandas?

Round here (and in many parts of East London) a chi-chi shop would be a men-only sauna. but I imagine that's not what the poster was referring to...

It's like Peter Rachman never went away. Good old London, lovely place.

Quirrel - Member

^ not sure

Website is loading slowly for me, i seem to remember pink on black for the colours of the shop

You could get cereal blended in, maybe they should join forces with the london shop

Yes, that's the exact one you are referring to as they used to one or two more shops but I guess they moved because of expensive shop rental. They used to have bigger units but now only small and located in the Metro station.

I like milkshake but Merican style only ... 😀

So it seems that the REAL issue here is the price of the cereal.

Which is dominated by rent and rates more than anything else, two things outside of the scope of control of the shop owners..

how many grams in a serving of their cereal?

Can you not see why this particular cafe might, to some, seem like an emblem* of the crass, middle-class consumerism which they see as damaging their community?

Go and trash that bike shop selling those £3000 bikes then, eh?

Saying that, being off your tits at 6am and being able to buy a bowl of easily stomachable cereal is a great idea.

Yeah but don't go to Cereal Killer Cafe - it's not open at 6am.

They have to charge a high price because of the crazy shop rental and business rate which majority of people don't know.

In the Toon £3k-4k rental/mth for a very tiny unit is the norm and that does not include the business rate which if I can recall is another £3k to £4k.

Basically anyone running a business selling stuff are actually feeding the city councils workers and their inflated salaries ...

how many grams in a serving of their cereal?

Are you implying that the whole cereal thing is just a front for another type of business entirely?

footflaps - Member

It's not as if inequality is suddenly a new thing, it's been increasing rapidly since the 1970s.

There is a very obvious contradiction in that comment.

If inequality has been "increasing rapidly since the 1970s" then it is obvious that what we are experiencing today is new.

Gentrification is something that's been happening in large cities for decades - New York leads the world in it, areas that were 'no go' for wealthy people 20 years ago, became 'up and coming' 10 years ago and 'high end' now. London is going through the same process and the 'hipsters' lead the charge, they make the unpalatable 'cool' and 'cool' makes cheap expensive in months not years and with most poor residents renting it means communities are wiped out when rents double or more.

munrobiker - Member

It seems a bizarre thing to go picking on. A £3.20 bowl of cereal sounds a lot, but it's something I, as someone who earns below the average national salary and flipping loves cereal, wouldn't begrudge paying as a treat. In the same way people will go out for a meal as at treat. Or buy a cake as a treat. I suspect there are restaurants and bakeries across Camden that are also a little expensive- it doesn't mean they are directly responsible for Camden becoming unaffordable because the prices are going up and the wages aren't.

I've been very generous and googled the address of where they ought to have gone protesting, at a place where the blame for a lack of growth, low wages and rising property prices thanks to the wallets of foreign millionaires and tax breaks for wealthy friends can squarely be pointed.

http://www.hampsteadandkilburn.org/contact-us

I think you're missing the point, it's not about cereal or what it costs - it's about making areas seem more palatable than they once were by making them 'cool'. London is suffering it's own 'housing crisis' the top of the market is being squeezed by foreign buyers who are buying up high-end stuff which has an knock-on effect down through the market - for some people it's a real winner - I recently saw a programme about "million pound homes" everything from a castle in Scotland with a leaky roof down to an ex-council house in East London, the owner bought it in the 80's during 'right to buy' for a pretty small amount of money - £50k maybe, he was a council worker himself, not sure what he did but we wore high viz and rubber gloves to work - he was selling his house to a developer who was going to turn it into 4 flats.

Can you imagine what that sort of change does to a community? Where once stood a basic family home worth £50k, 25 years later stands 4 flats worth £400k or so - such is the way of world everyone who owns anything in the area is now either selling for 7 figure sums or demanding a huge rent rise from their tenants. Within a few years that community is gone, yes that area is not much 'nicer' but what happens to it's former residents? With less and less parts of London now affordable they stuck between a rock and a hard place - leave everything they have and everyone they know and leave London or try to squeeze into another affordable bit?

Commuting is largely out of the question when it costs fortunes to live anywhere within a 2 hour train journey and the costs are huge - effectively leaving London unaffordable to anyone who isn't wealthy within a few years - how will public services cope?

It might sound far-fetched, but if you look at New York, the first city to really follow the 'gentrification' path there are now only 3 areas of New York which are affordable to the majority of people Canarsie, Bay Ridge, & South Shore, but at least in NY it's not so hard to commute from the cheaper areas.

Yeah but don't go to Cereal Killer Cafe - it's not open at 6am.

i assumed the comment regarding the queue of clubbers meant ravers

You're right ernie, my mistake, rising inequality had gone totally unnoticed until a bunch of thugs threw pain at a cereal shop...

anyone else reading this thread very glad they don't live anywhere near London? it's in it's own little world seperate from the rest of the Uk.

they should replace it with a Kebab shop

I fully support your proposal to turn London into a kebab shop.

London is suffering it's own 'housing crisis'

Nothing to do with selling cereal for £3.20 though.

We've decided to constrain supply by not building new homes and when we do, builders can pretty much opt of of social housing obligations, we've given massive tax breaks to overseas buyers, designed economic policy around maintaining a housing boom to keep up debt laden consumer spending, pursuing social cleansing policies (cut in-work benefits for the poor, capped benefits for the poor), drastically reduced the rights of organised labour (shifting wealth from workers to asset owners) etc....

anyone else reading this thread very glad they don't live anywhere near London? it's in it's own little world seperate from the rest of the Uk

London is now, to all intents and purposes, an independent city state. Most places in Britain have more in common with Papua, New Guinea than they do with central London.

And that would be fine.

Except the problem is that economic policy is dictated in the sole interests of this over-powerful (not yet independent) city state, its property developers, bankers and cereal shop owners, to the huge detriment of the rest of the country.

Don't worry binners, it's all about to change. A large billion dollar investment bank asked some of it's top millionaire economists about all this inequality malarkey and what to do about it and apparently the answer is absolutely nothing. It will just magically go away if we leave it alone..

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/27/the-era-of-cheap-labour-is-over

So best to keep paying £3,20 for a bowl of coco-pops otherwise you could be responsible for messing things up and making it all worse....

[url= http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lucky-Charms-Cereal-453g-Pack/dp/B0094DLRMO/ref=sr_1_1?s=grocery&ie=UTF8&qid=1443445446&sr=1-1&keywords=Lucky+charm+cereal ]Lucky Charms[/url]

So a 480 gram box of lucky charms is 5GBP. 35g appears to be the serving size on a box - so 14 servings per box, plus milk not sure what per pint cost is.

4 quid per bowl. I'm in the wrong game.

It's the mega city of the future so living cost will go up where most will not be able to afford regardless whether you work there or not. Trying to prevent that is futile really.

Their best bet is to move out but commute to work from another city ... traveling anything less than 1hr 30mis one way is acceptable (just to arrive in London so not counting Tube). I was doing that in other part of the world daily for several years ... each day 3hrs just traveling to and from work.

footflaps - Member

You're right ernie, my mistake, rising inequality had gone totally unnoticed until a bunch of thugs threw pain at a cereal shop...

You see, you said something rather silly and now you've gone all narky 🙂

That's obviously not what I said.

Still, I guess you had to think of some kind of retort, shame it just makes you look even sillier !

4 quid per bowl. I'm in the wrong game.

You need to sell a lot of bowls to pay £10-15k rent / month!

shame it just makes you look even sillier !

I'm sure I'll manage to cope.

footflaps - Member

4 quid per bowl. I'm in the wrong game.

You need to sell a lot of bowls to pay £10-15k rent / month!

The rent and business rate are the killers for business trying out their ideas, as a result they need to charge a high price in order to pay/feed the ZM council bureaucrats ...

You need to sell a lot of bowls to pay £10-15k rent / month!You need to sell a lot of bowls to pay £10-15k rent / month!

See that is where they went wrong. If they had just had a mobile pop-up cafe it would have all been fine....

[quote=jekkyl opined]anyone else reading this thread very glad they don't live anywhere near London? it's in it's own little world seperate from the rest of the Uk.

THIS

Not only could you not open a cereal bar anywhere near me you would need to be opening the box opening the plastic bag and pouring in a litre of milk then passing it to the customer* to get way with that price

* in the posher areas they would demand a spoon rather than just pour it into their mouths

To make 15k rent, they would need to sell 131kg of cereal at 4 quid per bowl.

Quirrel - Member
See that is where they went wrong. If they had just had a mobile pop-up cafe it would have all been fine....

Try that with the council then see how much they charge for the patch/location or even allow you to do that in that area ...

You might get away with one in Chorlton.

only Organic and fair trade but yes you might

As with most shops the value is in the location, as that is the unique asset. Hence the financial power is with the landlord not the shop owner. If you pay a fortune for a coffee on a train platform, it's British Rail (or whoever) making the money, not the coffee stand.

Blaming a cereal shop is just moronic beyond comprehension.

They weren't, as I understand it. The protest was in Brick Lane generally, and someone threw paint at the cereal shop.

deadlydarcy - Member

You might get away with one in Chorlton.

I was out in the Peoples Republic yesterday. Its a fiver a pint in most of the bars now its been colonised by the BBC Shoreditch invasion.

Absolutley crying out for a cereal bar, I'd say 😉

If you pay a fortune for a coffee on a train platform, it's British Rail (or whoever) making the money, not the coffee stand.

Is that a hunch or do you know it to be a fact?

I would be very surprised if the bulk of the cost of a cup of coffee on a train platform went on rent.

I'm sure that the price of a coffee would remain the same even if their stall was rent-free. Pricing is often based on "what can we get away with".

I love city wide gentrifications, they'rrrrree greeeeeattt.

someone threw paint at the cereal shop.

Crunchy Nut Cluster Bombs ftw.

someone threw paint at the cereal shop.

should have thrown some milk.

Is that a hunch or do you know it to be a fact?

I have to confess that I don't have all the rental figures for every coffee stand by a train platform to hand right now.

However, the business case is heavily weighted in the landlord's favour as they have the only unique asset. Costa/Pret/Starbucks are all selling effectively a commodity (over priced mediocre coffee).

To quote Real Estates Concepts: A Handbook

Tim Hartford shows in The Undercover Economist, coffee shop rents are highest in the best locations such as train stations

Which is a good book BTW (Tim Hartford, not the Real Estates one).

should have thrown some milk.

Magnolia?

Tim Hartford shows in The Undercover Economist, coffee shop rents are highest in the best locations such as train stations

Fair enough. I don't dispute that rents very significantly affect business costs, indeed isn't that one of the primary objections of gentrification? I think it would be naive to dismiss the "what can we get away with" element of pricing though.

I think it would be naive to dismiss the "what can we get away with" element of pricing though.

I don't disagree, most shops try and charge as much as the market will stand, but the landlord is probably making the highest return on investment (esp if he has owned for some time) and is often forgotten about especially when people are throwing paint or waving pig heads about in the street.

fwiw, i wish more cafes had the option of a £3 bowl of cereal.

breakfast 'out' usually means some configuration of egg and bacon (which i don't always want), for £7.