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Jessica Ritter

Professor Walpole

Computers in Business

4 November 2019

Biz Cafe Report

Introduction including your Coffee Shop name.

My groups café name is called House of Peace. The members in my group include Wendy

Hollis and David Baker. Each week we collaboratively complete the decisions to the best of our

abilities to make sure our café can run as smoothly as possible. With careful consideration in our

choices, we hope our café can thrive in this simulation and can get the best outcome possible in

regard to cash flow.

During these weeks, we have made a variety of decisions including hours of operation,

coffee prices, payroll, servers/managers hired, and etc. This simulation has been somewhat

challenging at times because we do not always know what choice is the best one for the House of

Peace café but overall my group has been excellent at working together to come up with the best

decisions.

What major decision(s) did you make that made a difference and were you able to sustain

the progress?

There was a variety of major decisions that my group made in the biz café

simulation. First was the price of our coffee. We tried to make it cheaper so more people would

buy it but not too inexpensive to where we were losing money in the process. Throughout the

weeks, we have lowered and raised the price of our coffee to experiment with what price would

work best for our cafe. At this point in time, our coffee price is set at three dollars and eighty-
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five cents give or take. This price has made a big difference in our café as more people are

buying coffee and we have been able to sustain the progress of it.

My group also decided on the number of employees and managers would be hired

at the House of Peace that was effective for our café. We currently have nine servers and three

managers, and our café seems to be running effectively with this amount. We have also been able

to sustain our progress with these employees even though one server quit this week. Another

major decision we made was the hours opened at the café. Our team wanted the coffee shop to

run longer than usual in hopes to bring in more customers as not many coffee shops run later

than two or three in the afternoon. The increased hours of operations has increased the cups sold

each week and by keeping the café open from eight in the morning to eight at night, Monday

through Saturday, and nine to six on Sunday we have been able to pull more customers in by

doing this and have been able to sustain our progress.

What surprised you the most about running the Coffee Shop?

What surprised me the most about running the coffee shop is that it actually is a lot

more challenging than I anticipated. There are a lot of decisions to be made such as how much

coffee and non-perishable items needs to be purchased, the days and hours that the café is open

from, hiring employees and deciding on their wages, as well as paying for advertising and

promotions. There is a variety of decisions to be made and it is difficult to always pick the best

choice for the company as the whole system is very fragile and throwing one decision off

balance will likely affect other decisions around it, creating a domino effect.

I was surprised that our café is not running as great compared to other cafes in the

simulation. I believed our prices and employee ratio were adequate but there are still tweaks to

be made to ensure our café is running at its best. Another thing that surprised me is having to
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make special decisions based on unique situations such as this week a customer was causing a

disturbance and needed to be escorted out of the café. Lastly, I was surprised that are café

satisfaction decreased this week and I’m not sure why so. I also am surprised and confused why

a server quit the restaurant and if it was because of the café or personal issues. Overall, it is hard

to completely understand why some things went the way they did in the café, but I will learn for

next time to make sure things run more smoothly.

What was the key change that you made that helped your coffee shop the most?

One of the key changes that helped the coffee shop the most was probably having a

fair price on the coffee. Our group experimented with different prices but noticed that three

dollars and ninety cents and up for a cup of coffee was too much, so we reduced it to around

three dollars and eighty-five cents and it seems to help out the business a lot more than we

expected. More customers were coming in for a cup of coffee and we noticed throughout the

days of the week, our number of coffee orders was leveling out and there was not a drastic

decrease in the amount of coffee ordered at the café so that was a good sign.

In the beginning weeks of the simulation, our coffee was priced at three dollars and

forty cents and we realized that that was too low for the café and we were not making as much

money as we would like to. After we increased the price of the coffee to around three dollars and

sixty cents, we noticed we were increasing our net worth. Although, around week six of the

simulation, we decided to bump up the coffee to three dollars and ninety to ninety-five cents and

we realized customers were not coming into the café as much to buy a cup of coffee as before.

We decided to reduce the price of the coffee to three dollars and eight-five cents and that seemed

to bring in more customers because we decreased our price by around ten cents.
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If you had a chance to start over would you change your approach? Why or why not?

If I had to start over, I think I would slightly change the approach because we are

not getting as much net worth as I thought we would be receiving. I will say decreasing the

number of servers would probably help save some money in that area, but it is unsure if that

would actually help or not. At this moment, we currently have nine servers, but I would have

maybe reduced it to eight or maybe even seven servers. Although, if it does not work and we

need to hire more servers, my team can always change it back up to nine servers and then I will

know for next time that reducing the servers is not effective.

I also think lowering their wages slightly would save money as well. Not by too

much because I don’t want to lose servers because the wages are too low but maybe just by thirty

to fifty cents would help out a little bit. I will say that the hiccups in our café decisions have been

useful as they can help us understand what to do in future problems that may arise as we have

more experience in what happens in certain situations. So, although I would like to change my

approach in a couple ways, I do think that the approach my group took was a learning experience

and we did the best we could with our decisions with the knowledge we had at that time. So even

though, we made mistakes along the way that decreased our cash flow, it did help us understand

what decisions we needed to change for the future.

Provide me with a takeaway from your business simulation experience

Overall, I thought this business simulation experience was very interesting. I

learned a lot about running a business and realized it’s a lot more work than I thought and there

is a lot of ups and downs in the process of running it. My team was great at communicating with

each other and we got a long very well during this experience. The simulation was different than

what I expected but I thought it was a great learning experience. I didn’t expect to run in to so
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many irritated customers and needing to make so many special decisions to get them to calm

down.

It was difficult to make the best decisions for the café such as the coffee prices,

wages, and how many servers and manager should be employed. It usually became a trial and

error process because I had no background experience in those areas. But after the weeks went

by, I got more comfortable with the decisions and felt I had a better grasp on what choices I

should make that would be the best for the company. Not only did this experience open my eyes

to how businesses are ran but it also made me have more respect for the people running actual

businesses and the difficult choices they have to make every day.