No more Neroes

I had a meeting in the middle of Kendal, this morning, and I rang ahead to see if anyone fancied a coffee. Thus, just after ten o'clock, I found myself queuing in Caffè Nero for an Americano and a couple of lattes. The queue was quite long as there was only one member of staff behind the counter and I heard her explain to another customer that her colleague was on his break.

Watching this young woman gamely plugging away at a slowly extending queue of testy customers made me think of her bosses leaving the shop understaffed which, by a slightly roundabout route, put me in mind of the £21.1m pre-tax profit that Caffè Nero made in 2013 without paying any corporation tax (see BBC article here).

Now, I know I have some ethics-blindness when it comes to Starbucks but there's no reason to extend this personal failing to cover all tax evading/avoiding coffee shops and so, this afternoon, when I returned to Kendal for another meeting, I sought an alternative and found myself down this little ginnel at Baba Ganoush. I'm pleased to report that their coffee was excellent and I'll be taking my custom there in future.