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Megan McArdle

Megan McArdle - Megan McArdle is a senior editor for The Atlantic who writes about business and economics. She has worked at three start-ups, a consulting firm, an investment bank, a disaster recovery firm at Ground Zero, and The Economist. More

Megan was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and yes, she does enjoy her lattes, as well as the occasional extra-dry skim-milk cappuccino. Her checkered work history includes three start-ups, four years as a technology project manager for a boutique consulting firm, a summer as an associate at an investment bank, and a year spent as sort of an executive copy girl for one of the disaster-recovery firms at Ground Zero … all before the age of 30.

While working at Ground Zero, Megan started Live From the WTC, a blog focused on economics, business, and cooking. She may or may not have been the first major economics blogger, depending on whether we are allowed to throw outlying variables such as Brad Delong out of the set. From there it was but a few steps down the slippery slope to freelance journalism. She has worked in various capacities for The Economist, where she wrote about economics and oversaw the founding of Free Exchange, the magazine's economics blog. She has also maintained her own blog, Asymmetrical Information, which moved to The Atlantic, along with its owner, in August 2007.

Megan holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago. After a lifetime as a New Yorker, she now resides in northwest Washington, D.C., where she is still trying to figure out what one does with an apartment larger than 400 square feet.

Real Business: No Customers Need Apply

By Megan McArdle
Apr 15 2009, 11:30 AM ET Comment

Every so often, you come across a business that is real, and amazing.  That is, it's amazing that it's a real business, one that some blithe soul expects to make money off of.  Readers are, of course, encouraged to submit their own examples.

Today I give you:  The Sufi Coffee Shop.

Yesterday, a friend dragged me to a place called Sufi Coffee Shop in Mountain View (El Camino just north of Castro). The coffee was actually quite good -- it had better be quite good, the cheapest cup of drip -- of drip was $3.50. (The most expensive was $6.75. Admittedly, it was Blue Mountain.)

But the attitude. Wow, the attitude. The place is covered from wall-to-wall with angry signs admonishing the customers for various sorts of misbehavior. I took a photo of the first one, and the owner turned around, sternly instructed me "no photos!," and then demanded, as an implicit condition of selling me any coffee, that I delete the one I had taken. 

Fortunately, the owner isn't terribly iphone-literate, and so, well, suffice it to say that not only did I not delete the first photo, but I took numerous more besides.

That's just the teaser.  You really need to click through and gawk at the pictures. 

Study Question:  Is the Sufi Coffee Shop primarily selling coffee, or abuse?

 

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