“Our shop will be—a place that offers experiences to our clients that can only be found at the Genius Festival… Well, I suppose there’s no use dragging it out any longer—my proposal for our submission to the Genius Festival is a café!”
“A…café? What’s that?”
“A shop that sells tea and light refreshments, Princess Colette.”
“Oh, so you mean a teahouse. Yes, I suppose eateries were a blind spot for us…but isn’t that a bit crude?”
Colette surprised me by responding with blatant disappointment, though I didn’t blame her. Saying “Let’s do a café!” after all that bravado was probably a bit of a letdown.
“But just about everyone here enjoys a daily teatime already, don’t they?” Colette argued. “Many of us have our cooks leave tea and snacks for us on their days off, too. I honestly don’t see how running a teahouse would provide anybody with a unique experience.”
I giggled. “Ohh, Princess Colette. It most certainly will be.”
Of course it would be a unique experience. Everyone who went to this school was a rich kid. Even after they moved out of their mansions and came to the dorms, tea was just a part of their mundane daily routine.
Additionally, the cooks at the academy who prepared the tea and desserts were first-rate—and that’s no exaggeration. Making spoiled rich kids with refined palates moan with delight was no ordinary feat.
And that was exactly why the whole sales model had its limits. These kids ate good food and saw expensive things every day. Unless you offered them a superior product or a novel experience, you wouldn’t whet their appetites.
What I said earlier about things coming across as cheap is everything. If your customer base is rich kids who are used to seeing the best entertainment and eating the best food, your best chance at winning is to offer them something relatively good that they can only experience here. That was why I’d concluded that selling things at the Genius Festival was not the way to go.
Now, based off that logic, a café was a dumb idea even by dumb-idea standards. If we offered refreshments to rich kids who were used to eating the finest of foods, the odds would be against us.
Which was exactly why we really had to sell the experience.
“What I am suggesting is no ordinary eating establishment. No, I’m proposing a nouveau establishment where our servers dress in cute or handsome uniforms and fraternize with the customers. We shall sell the VIP treatment!”
That is the element that turns an ordinary place to drink tea into a café.
“The VIP treatment…?!”
“Yes. It’s a bit uncouth, but there’s nothing at all unfavorable about being pampered by beautiful boys and girls. Our guests will surely find it a valuable experience to be flirted with by waiters and waitresses in modern-style clothing.”
There was a note of pride in my voice as I talked them through the idea—but of course, I hadn’t come up with a silly idea like this on my own.
There was a reason I’d led with the caveat that this café was a bit uncouth. It was the sort of establishment that had gotten popular right at the onset of Eltania’s moral collapse.
It didn’t get more VIP than scantily clad ladies cozying up to customers, and I remembered those kinds of businesses being quite popular back in the day. Adan had taken me to one of those cafés just once. At the time, I hadn’t understood why he needed to go out of his way to ogle women when he had a wife at home, but I was humbly impressed by that café’s business model.
After all, its food and tea tasted sketchy as shit, yet it was packed every day. Maybe that particular establishment we went to happened to be one of the bad ones, but that didn’t stop it from being consistently popular.
There was another element of the café that stood out to me: Not a single soul came there to sip tea. Including my drooling friend, everyone there came to see the waitresses in costume.
You could say the customers were paying to see a show. Only, instead of buying tickets at the door, they were purchasing mid-tier tea at inflated prices.
In time, the café was subdivided into costumes and schmoozing. Just before the civil war broke out, there were things called maid cafés, which featured girls dressed in maid uniforms (with skirts that were way too short) who treated their customers like masters—but I digress.
“What I’m saying is, in our café, tea and refreshments play second fiddle. We will give our customers a unique experience only to be found here—that will be our café’s true appeal.”
Naturally, that sort of business would only be successful if your wait staff were above a certain threshold of good looks, but luckily, this school was a gathering of rich kids who were the product of generations of hotties hooking up. We had nothing to worry about in that department.
And horny heads of houses who selected only maids with pretty faces—well, they weren’t rare, but people who are blessed in life have an attractive confidence in their eyes. They call it elegance—but being served by people with that vibe would surely provide yet another flavor of experience for our guests.
“…So that’s what you meant by selling an experience.” With an enlightened sigh, Colette sank into thought.
Okay, I’ve played my card. Now let’s see if I can break through the final wall of defense.
There was just one potential flaw in my idea: Could spoiled rich kids work a service job?
Even though my peers were only half-baked as aristocrats, most of them had fully formed egos. Whether or not they could be in a position of service could pose a problem, but there was just one easy way to break through that barrier—
“I see…so it’s an eatery on the surface, but it’s actually closer to theater! Yes, that would certainly provide a special, once-in-a-lifetime experience!”
—an endorsement from on high.
The nobility prized hierarchy. And the princess of Colorne—one of the strongest empires on the continent—had said it sounded like fun. There was no way the other students wouldn’t agree with her.
All relationships among the students here were equal as a rule, but any son or daughter of the nobility would kill to get connections with the princess of Colorne. Anyone with a brain would never get on her bad side.
The only person in this room who might consider dissenting against Colette would be Albert, but—
“That’s my Miss Mylene…! Only you would think of placing value not on the food and drink itself, but in the way it’s served! I am in awe!”