ST. LOUIS — As the owner of a retail business, doubling your footprint in downtown St. Louis isn't necessarily an easy call.
Outside of Washington Avenue and Ballpark Village, the retail scene in the city's Central Business District was far from robust prior to the pandemic, and made worse as a result of it.
Yet sometimes, business decisions are made not based upon the prevailing patterns, but by the move of a single chess piece. That's the case for Dale Schotte, the owner of St. Louis-based coffee and gooey butter cake purveyor Park Avenue Coffee.
When coffee giant Starbucks last year closed its location at Sixth and Olive streets, Schotte, who already operates a Park Avenue Coffee location five blocks west at a 417 N. 10th St., saw an opportunity to fill the specialty coffee void in a prime location across from One Metropolitan Square, one of downtown's biggest office buildings.
Park Avenue Coffee is opening a second downtown location within the former Starbucks site, fueled by Schotte's belief that office dwellers in the Central Business District will favor convenience over the benefits of a neighborhood jaunt.
"The folks (in those office buildings) getting the coffee in the middle of the day aren’t walking five blocks to get it. We don’t have a lot of those people making the trip to our 10th Street location," he said.
Like any retail operation in post-pandemic America, the opening hasn't been easy. A planned mid-July launch was stalled by delays in the delivery of refrigeration equipment. And when the equipment arrived, Schotte lost some of the staff he'd hired, furthering delays.
But now he's confident the second downtown Park Avenue Coffee, the company's sixth location, will be fully staffed and ready to open in early September, while maintaining hope that Covid's Delta variant won't further delay the return of more office workers to the neighborhood.
"People are (going to get) back in the offices," he said. "Those financial firms down there want their employees back in the office."
COFFEE AND IT
Schotte's venture into coffee began as the IT guy.
Back in 2004, he was a network engineer with a corporate job and his own IT consulting firm on the side when an acquaintance decided to open a coffee shop in Lafayette Square. She asked him for help setting up the store's internal network and point-of-sale system.
While helping launch what would become the first Park Avenue Coffee location at 1919 Park Ave., Schotte — a self-anointed "coffee snob" — fell in love with the business.
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