It’s a tough world for small businesses. Most of them have to fight for customers and have to compete against huge national stores. So, when they get broken into, that’s the one more thing they have to worry about.
That’s what happened to Sugar Brown’s Coffee, a coffee shop on 19th Street.
Before they served their first cup of coffee on Wednesday morning, Sugar Brown’s staff was sweeping up glass. They said hundreds of dollars were stolen. For a small business, every dollar counts.
“For a small local business, that’s a big deal. Maybe for a larger business, it’s not going to be as big of a deal,” Justin Stice, owner of Sugar Brown’s, said. “It’s super discouraging. It’s a kick in the stomach, man.”
They smashed the window to the entrance and entered that way. Then, the thief went to the cash box. The thief took the cash box and smashed it in the women’s bathroom, taking the money with them.
“We stockpile to get us through, but now we’re having to use our reserves to take care of this,” Stice said. “It becomes difficult to make sure we get through the summer and everything.”
With national coffee chains just down the road, Stice said it’s easy to get discouraged.
“For Starbucks, when you’re a large corporation, a large chain, they may have things like this happen, but they have the cash flow that reserves to cover it,” Stice said. “For a small local business, it’s rough to recover from something like this.”
Unfortunately, Sugar Brown’s doesn’t have any surveillance video of the night, so they’re hoping anybody who might have saw something will come forward and let police know.
