Coffee Alley is a coffeehouse chain store based in Taiwan. It was founded in December 2006 by five young people. The Taiwanese name of the coffeehouse was based on the first location of the store in Zhongxiao East Road, and is intended to convey a sense of playing around with coffee.
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The store started out in a store of 534.45 square feet but has been extending its scale rapidly in the last eight years. There are six branches in Taiwan and made its debut in Hong Kong in January 2013. Like some other high street coffeehouses, Coffee Alley requires a drink per person as minimum consumption and a 90 minutes dining time limit during peak hours.
Products
Coffee Alley signatures in its coffee beverages, ranging from iced drip coffee to house coffee. Non- caffeine beverages include smoothies and juice. Their food menu focuses on sandwiches and salads, mainly continental style food and desserts.
Business
Coffee Alley founders utilize online platform to achieve promotion objectives, setting up Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube accounts to achieve promotion objectives. To maintain an identical form of business as the Taiwan branches, the Hong Kong branches hire staffs who are not older than 27 years old, and waiters mainly communicate with customers in Mandarin despite the Cantonese speaking majority in Hong Kong. Like in Taiwan, dress code of waiters are casual dressing, basically anything with the Coffee Alley apron attached.
Since reservation service is not available, in the first year of business in Hong Kong, the average queuing time is around 90 minutes. Responding to this phenomenon there are netizens commenting about queuing tactics, such as what time to start queuing and ordering tactic, to ensure their dining experience would worth the wait. The problem is later solved by arranging queuing tickets to customers, the queuing trend has declined.
Coffee Alley’s business competitors are other Taiwanese cafes featuring similar shop decoration, and product range, including Dazzling Cafe and Teawood. Their target customers are also young people and the queuing phenomenon happens to these competitors as well. As a later comer to the Taiwanese cafe business sector in Hong Kong, it’s business is in a competitive scale comparing with its congener.
Branches
There are in total eight branches in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Two of them are in Hong Kong and the others are in Taiwan.