Beginning with the mundane, the monthly points out a cup of Japan's 400 yen to 500 yen coffee requires only 10 grams of coffee beans and really costs only 30 yen to 40 yen to make. At large coffee shop chains, the cost could be as low as 4 yen or 5 yen a cup.
::cough:: bullshit! You always hear this crap from people who failed basic econ in high school. What about the costs of renting (or buying) the land for the establishment? Costs of labor, costs of transportation, costs of insurance for customers who trip over themselves at your doorstep?
Here's a good example. You're running a StarBucks in Shibuya, and you have 10 employees on staff at the moment. Let's assume that 9 of the 10 are grunts, making about 800JPN per hour. The last is a floor manager, making salary at the cost of about 2000JPY per hour. That means for each hour of operation, the cost of business is almost 10000JPY per hour.
So, if the establishment makes on average 400JPY (as the journalist is reporting) per transaction, then to just break even you need an arrival/service rate of at least 25 transactions per hour.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to do the basic math for figuring out the other costs...
