Among hundreds of coffee houses in the Valley, some dare to keep their doors open all night. But eventually, some of these doors may close.
Tempe's Xtreme Bean coffee shop thrives on students needing a late-night hangout. Still, the former Counter Culture Café in Phoenix went under two years after its opening because of an unsteady customer base.
Every Friday and Saturday, Xtreme Bean coffee shop stays open 24 hours to cater to the local night owls looking for caffeine.
Manager and history senior John Richards said the coffee house originally closed at 2 a.m. when it opened in 2003. Within months, Richards said the store began to keep its doors open all night.
"Since we had wireless Internet, we had people move outside on their laptops when we closed," Richards said. "When we'd open up at 5 a.m., they'd move back in."
Sunday through Thursday, the shop is open until 11 p.m.
Richards said the weekend hours are "convenient" for Tempe's population.
"On Friday and Saturday night, people are used to staying out late," he said.
The late-night clientele usually consists of students and gamers who are looking down at their laptops all night.
"Gamers get what I call the geek's latte — a large Mt. Dew," he said. "You see a lot of tops of heads at night."
Richards said January is the business's slowest month because students are gone on winter break.
Xtreme Bean's other customers include home-business owners, professionals and coffee drinkers looking to avoid chains, Richards said.
"People are starting to get sick of Starbucks," he said. "We're benefiting from the Starbucks rebound."
According to Starbucks Coffee's Web site, the company has 16 stores in Tempe.
Recent ASU graduate Susanne Sansone said she goes to Xtreme Bean because of the lack of 24-hour store options. Sansone said she usually reads or surfs the Web while at the coffee shop late at night.
"I started coming for the free Internet," she said, "but now I stay to read and get away."
The store's early-morning hours also attract business from those just getting off work or starting early, Richards said.
"There are people who work graveyards, people who work swing shifts who drive through here," he said.
Richards said the store has no plans, however, to extend its 24-hour service to any other day.
"On a Sunday night at 3 a.m., when no one is out, is it smart to have somebody here?" he said. "You're talking about electricity, water, payroll, everything."
The former Counter Culture Café in Phoenix took the chance and marketed itself as being open for 24 hours all seven days a week.
The coffee house, which started in December 2004, closed in November 2006.
In 2005, the shop won the award for being the best 24-hour coffee shop from the Phoenix New Times.
Former owner Andres Yuhnke said the idea of running a 24-hour coffee shop seemed promising in Phoenix.
"Have you ever tried to find some place to go after a show or club closed that wasn't someone's house and wasn't Denny's?" he said. "We're the fifth largest city in the nation, but we still roll up the sidewalks at midnight."
Yuhnke said the café's peak hours were 11 p.m. to 1 a.m., with all types of customers coming in.
"It was a bit of a social experiment, a petri dish where the members of various sub-cultures could come and cross-pollinate," he said. "There were VW buses parked next to Lexus sedans."
The café was supposed to be a "learning and wellness center," with vegan food options, local art and music.
"Imagine an urban counterculture YMCA," he said.
In the end, though, Yuhnke said the numbers were "abysmal."
He attributed the café's failure to a lack of initial capital, difficulty with landlords and loiterers who only came into the café to use its free Internet.
"People would always come in and exclaim that we must be doing well, based on how packed the place typically was," he said. "But the problem was that most of the people in the place on any given night would be loiterers."
Just one more sale per hour would have made Counter Culture break even, Yuhnke said.
"So for all those people who claim to support local businesses and who claimed to love counter culture, if they could've put their money where their mouth was, Counter Culture would still be open," he said.
Reach the reporter at: celeste.sepessy@asu.edu.
