Local coffee shop Soko Coffee closed its doors for good on April 28. The coffee shop operated on Oakway and Cal Young Road began as a cart planned to operate on weekends and at private events and opened in the summer of 2020.
UO alumnus and co-owner of Soko Coffee Kevin Yamaka explained how the rising costs of labor and goods impacted the shop’s ability to stay afloat.
“For us, what it really boiled down to were just operating costs outpacing sales,” Yamaka said. Soko Coffee, which operated in the Cal Young neighborhood, began as a simple cart before upgrading to brick and mortar.
Similar to many small businesses that have closed down recently, the biggest cost of running the business was labor.
“We had to offer a competitive wage for people and felt like we weren’t able to reduce our labor costs that much,” Yamaka said.
Soko operated as a specialty coffee shop, meaning that Yamaka and his wife Leslie, also a UO alumna, bought their products wholesale.
“We weren’t roasting our coffee, we were getting them from vendors, and each one of those things cut into our margins,” Yamaka said.
UO senior Victoria Greene has worked at Moke’s Coffee and Kitchen for just over two years. Greene says that while Moke’s has not been hit hard by the rising costs of goods and wages, there have been small adjustments that the cafe has made.
“We only recently did a menu change,” Greene said. “With that, we had to increase the prices of things. Coffee increased by 50 cents.”
Greene says that regulars will memorize the prices of their go-to menu items. To keep customers loyal, Moke’s put up signs giving a heads-up that certain items would increase in price.
“When we had to implement those price changes, a lot of people were really understanding about it,” Greene said. “I was shocked that [owner Mike Coplin] was able to keep our prices low for so long.”
From March 2023 to March 2024, compensation costs for workers increased by 4.2% on average nationwide.
Yamaka explained how difficult it was that the shop did not have features like a drive-thru window that could have helped bring in more volume.
For a specialty shop like Soko, relying on pure volume of sales, it can be difficult for owners to charge enough to keep their business running.
“If we set the price too high, we would have people coming in once or twice instead of three to five times a week,” Yamaka said. “The amount that we would have to charge to offset our operating costs would have been way too high.”
