Thomas Breen photo
Inside the new Shiru Cafe on College Street.
New Haven’s newest cafe refused to serve me tea or refugee-made baklava. It refuses to serve the high school kids across the street, or tens of thousands of other people who live in New Haven. But it did try to sell me on its new business model for running a college-town coffee shop fueled by customers’ data.
The new coffee shop is called Shiru Cafe, which opened its doors Wednesday at 174 College St. on the first floor of one of New Haven’s newest upscale apartment complexes.
If you’re a college student, you’re in luck. You’re invited in to surrender your personal data, come in, and spend hours enjoying food and beverages and free wifi.
If you’re any other New Haven resident, the staff will kindly ask you to bring your business elsewhere.
The new cafe is right across from Co-Op High School, whose students cannot shop or hang out there. It sells Havenly Treats baklava, whose refugee chefs may not sit inside or buy their own food there. Yale students started the Havenly Treats collaborative as a social-action project to help refugee chefs integrate into New Haven; so the student organizers, unlike the refugees themselves, may eat the baklava at Shiru. (Update: After this article was published, Havenly pulled out as a baklava supplier to Shiru and said it plans to organize a boycott.)
Thomas Breen photo
Inside the new Shiru Cafe on College Street.
Shiru, a chain founded in Japan in 2013, has two other locations in U.S. college communities, Amherst, Mass., and Providence, R.I.. It requires that all customers have a college or university ID in order to be served. The goal is not necessarily to serve coffee, but to provide an exclusive cafe-like experience and connections to potential employers in exchange for student data. Coffee’s free; other food allegedly sells at cost.
“We’re trying to change the normal way of doing things, so that students don’t have to go through what was uncomfortable in the past,” the local cafe’s manager, Barbara Jeanne Lafond, told the Independent on Wednesday after this reporter tried, and failed, to buy a cup of tea. I was allowed to tarry a bit to learn more about the newest addition to New Haven’s coffeehouse scene.
Click on the Facebook Live video at the top of the article to watch an interview with Lafond and the cafe’s spokesperson that took place after the refusal to serve.
That student discomfort, presumably, involved having to find a space in a “traditional” cafe where anyone can sip a cup of coffee, nosh, hang out, do work, chat, and apply for jobs.
So instead, Shiru Cafe has crafted an exclusive, cafe-like space designed to connect college students with potential employers.
College students must register through a Shiru app, which asks about name, age, school affiliation, and course of study.
Then, when they arrive at the cafe, they must present their student IDs to the baristas they can pick up a free cup of coffee or purchase a baked good provided by Havenly or Katalina’s.
Shiru says it uses the data submitted by student customers to connect them with partner employers like Racepoint Global and Service After Service that are looking to hire college-educated interns and workers.
Critics of that data-for-coffee-and-jobs business model have called into question the privacy and security of information provided by students to the cafe, as well as the cafe’s partnerships with corporate giants like JP Morgan.
“The unique business model that we operate under at the end of the day isn’t really about selling coffee,” said Isabel Stroving, Shiru’s vice president of client strategy and its media spokesperson. Instead, she said, it’s about connecting college students with jobs.
“These are designated spaces for students to empower their future careers,” she said. “I think the biggest thing to remember is that we’re not your traditional coffee shop. We’re not your traditional business. We’re really trying to do something new here.”
And why can’t high school students join in on the free coffee and job connections?
“High school students aren’t looking for a career,” Lafond said, “they’re looking to go to college to get the career.”
Is This Legal?
Allan Appel Photo
Civil-rights attorney Taubes: Could be grounds for a lawsuit here.
Stroving said that the business, despite its unorthodox business model, is fully legal and in compliance with federal anti-discrimination legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits businesses from discriminating against customers because of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
“We’re certainly legally owned and operated and everything like that,’ she said, “because the idea of student is inclusive of all of those different backgrounds. We’re just filling the niche specifically for students, the same way that a specific app or something like that might be specifically geared towards students.”
Local civil rights attorney Alex Taubes is less confident in the legal soundness of Shiru’s business model.
“The business may be right about current civil rights law in Connecticut,” he told the Independent, “but it’s no sure thing, and even if they’re challenged and win in court, the city or state could always change the law.”
He noted that the dating app Tinder recently paid out over $17 million to settle a California class action lawsuit related to the app’s practice of charging people 30 and older double the standard price for one of its subscription services.
“The app’s defense was that it’s like having a ‘student discount,’” Taubes continued, “but ultimately settled. Whether the cafe’s ‘business model’ survives may come down to its promise that it isn’t just for Yalies — that, for example, students from Gateway and Southern will have an equal opportunity to use the space. Otherwise, it will be subject to challenge from lawsuits and the public.”
Even one city official who attended the cafe’s grand opening on Wednesday expressed some reservation over the business model in an otherwise laudatory Facebook post.
“I attended another interesting grand opening in New Haven today,” Deputy Economic Development Administrator Steve Fontana wrote on Facebook Wednesday night, “this time for Shiru Cafe on College Street. It’s unfortunately a place only for college students, designed for them to meet and connect with potential employers.”
But Fontana saw an upside: “It offers free coffee, free WiFi, and free electronics charging in an absolutely beautiful space. If you’re in school, or know someone who is, it’s a new and innovative concept definitely worth their checking out … it’s only the 3rd of its kind in the U.S.!”
The only students inside the cafe Wednesday afternoon with whom this reporter was able to speak before management asked me to leave were Yale students.
Four declined to comment as this reporter asked for their thoughts on the cafe’s unique business model as the cafe’s manager stood a few feet away, video recording the conversation on her phone.
Tiffany Hu, a student at the Yale School of Public Health, did speak. She said she was intrigued by and appreciated the cafe’s business model of providing free coffee to college students. Students are often on tight budgets, she said, and some cannot afford to go to a cafe and pay for coffee and food every time they need to get off campus and do work.
But, she said, she recognizes that the cafe might prove to be a problem in how it segregates college students from other city residents.
“Historically there’s been a divide between Yale and the New Haven community,” she said. “This probably doesn’t help.”