Operating during COVID: Remove Indoor Seating

This blog is a part of the series 7 tips for pick-up only service. This article centers around best practices for removing indoor seating to create a safe shop for baristas and customers.

Remove Indoor Seating

More states are increasing restrictions on the hospitality industry, mandating that cafes can only remain open for take out. To align with this protocol and prevent any prolonged lingering from customers eliminating your seating.

Here's a quick look at some best practices we've seen from successful joe partners, and how you can implement them into your shop.

Reconfigure your cafe

Removing any indoor seating heavily reduces the spread of germs from customer to customer, and prevents any dine-in experiences, all while keeping your doors open.

Suggested options:

• Stack tables on top of one another so customers aren't tempted to sit down. This also keeps your cafe cleaner!
• Use any racks of merchandise to create a designated area for walk in customers and it will encourage additional spending for larger tickets
• Set up tables and your POS at your front entrance to create a barrier from the espresso bar and prevent customers from lingering in the cafe (this is the most common approach)
• Create a temporary menu in the window for customers to view outside at safe distance

Here are some joe partners who have transformed their cafe's by removing all indoor seating.

Peregrine's 3 D.C. locations turned their full service cafes into limited service walk up windows by placing one of the tables in the door way. For added safety measures, they added a hanging clear partition at face level 

Mulvi's Coffee moved their entire POS system to the front entrance of their shop so that it is a safe distance away from their baristas. 

Carabello Coffee utilized a side window of their cafe to serve customers. Stanchions on the sidewalk make for an easy flow. Plus, they added chalked lines on the sidewalk to ensure their customers are remaining a safe 6ft apart from one another.

Going completely mobile and contact-free with joe is the safest way to continue serving your customers. If you're interested in getting started, email us at success@joe.coffee and we can have you accepting orders in as little as 24 hours.