The overabundance of coffee shops in Thailand is crazy

Those of us all say it with a bit of sarcasm in our voices when we see a new business being set up anywhere in Chiang Mai and the same sentiment exists anywhere else in this country with a reasonably large population: "I bet that is going to be a coffee shop." It sounds silly but if you say this, there is a better-than-average chance that your prediction is going to be true.

I don't know what compels people to open a business that there are already far too many of, especially when you only need to be around for a short while to realize that almost all of these places, even some of the international chain ones, end up going out of business in a short amount of time. There are zero quaint coffeeshops that exist in this city that have a reputation and have been around for decades. Every new one that opens is a near exactly facsimile of dozens that have been there before, often in the same building.

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These shops are almost always exactly the same thing from one to the next. They feature the usual Italian coffee drinks and probably also some sort of bubble tea. Other than that, they normally will have a bunch of cakes that they didn't make on site and are mostly dry and rather tasteless. I can only imagine that this is where they make their money all the while not being responsible for the quality of said items. Having a bakery requires substantially greater amount of investment and talent whereas someone can get an espresso machine and get trained as a barista for a couple thousand dollars, perhaps less.

My decision on which coffeeshop to go to is based almost entirely on proximity because I haven't noticed any real difference from one shop to the next. Honestly, it all tastes exactly the same regardless of where you go. I do not go to international chains so perhaps those are different but I am never going to find out because I outright refuse to pay $5 for a cup of coffee especially in a "cheap" country like this one.

The other day I was talking to a friend of mine about how many coffee shops he thinks there are in Chiang Mai and he pulled up a Gmap to show how absolutely inundated this city is with precisely this sort of business.

This is merely the downtown historical area as well. If we were to zoom out you would expect them to be more spread out and you would be correct, they are. But to give you an idea about how overstocked coffee shops are in just this one city, the suburb that I live in is about 12km from the city center and once I leave my subdivision where no retail or commercial buildings are allowed, I am less than 100 meters from several different options. I have tried all of them at one point or another and just like I expected, they are exactly the same.

I have been out cycling in the middle of friggin nowhere and will pass coffeeshops regularly despite the fact that there is zero other industry or even residences around you. It's just crazy how many of these things the area has.

Every now and then a coffeeshop will open somewhere and they have just the right mix of scenery and probably air conditioning and when one shop experiences success, 3 more shops will open at the same area offering exactly the same items. Therefore, the already low amount of potential customers get spread too thin and all of them go out of business. Then they will sit empty for a spell and a few months later someone comes along and rents one of the vacant buildings..... and then opens a coffeeshop and the process repeats itself. It's just madness from a business point of view.

What I am trying to say here is that I have a difficult time imagining the mind of a person that thinks that opening a business type that this city already has thousands of would ever think this would be a good idea.