Cafes, where guests are offered coffee free of charge, tea, juices and for that – also free of charge – rice salty cookies, they are very popular in Japan, Furthermore – they bring the owners a nice profit. Japanese media write about it. Café “Harimaya Station” in Tokyo is calculated on 114 seats, which are usually busy. Customers can choose freshly ground coffee, Japanese tea or juice to the saucer with eight kinds of traditional Japanese spicy rice cakes, which are baked on the spot. If the proposed pastries suit the customer, can buy them on the spot. According to the owners of the premises, who have been baking rice crackers for a long time, z 1000 guests, who come to the cafe every day, 500-600 people buy something. And that's two or three times more, than before, before it opened “free” cafes.
Such coffee shops outside Tokyo operate in Kyoto and Fukuoka. A manufacturer of rice pastries – company Harimaya – ma 12 stores in various prefectures of Japan. The annual turnover of this network is estimated at 7 billion yen (ok. 73 million dollars). Profits from free coffee shops are not yet disclosed.
