The Coffee Cart at the End of the Pier

Every morning at six, before the gulls have finished arguing over the night's leftovers, Mara Quill wheels a stainless-steel cart eight hundred feet down the pier and begins the only commute in town that ends surrounded by water on three sides.

The cart has no name. The regulars call it “the end of the pier,” which is both a location and, depending on the day, a mood. Quill sells exactly four things: coffee, better coffee, a cinnamon roll, and — on Fridays — a second batch of cinnamon rolls that sells out before the fog does.

What makes the cart interesting to an economist, if one ever wandered this far from the parking lot, is how Quill prices it. There is no loyalty card. There is no subscription, no twelve-visit punch system, no app. You pay for the cup in front of you, and only the cup in front of you.

“People kept asking me to start a membership,” Quill says, wiping down a counter that does not need wiping. “And I kept asking them: do you want coffee, or do you want a relationship with a billing department?”

The regulars, it turns out, wanted coffee. Tourists especially. Nobody visiting for a single foggy Saturday wants to commit to a monthly plan, but nearly all of them will happily pay for…