Is Opening a Coffee Shop Easy? Coffee Shop Owners Complain About Customers Causing Trouble and Running Away!

Beyond actually drinking coffee, "taking photos, checking in, and posting to social media" has become the standard routine for many young visitors to coffee shops. Out with friends or a boyfriend, they order one coffee and launch into a full photo shoot. Two hours later the coffee sits untouched — yet the post reads "Today's coffee was so delicious!" alongside nine carefully selected solo shots curated from hundreds taken.

In this social-media era where visiting cafés is primarily a photography exercise, one shop owner finally lost patience and vented online — sharing stories of customers who did outrageous things for the sake of a photo, then bolted before anyone could react.

Recently, the owner of Bucolic Khaoyai, a well-known coffee shop in Thailand's Khao Yai National Park, posted on Facebook about an incident in which a female customer, dissatisfied with her boyfriend's photography skills, threw coffee at him mid-argument — leaving him drenched and the table, floor, and decorations all splattered.

The owner later shared surveillance screenshots showing the woman hurling her coffee straight at her boyfriend. The shouting match plus the flying coffee turned the café into chaos. Before staff could even process what had happened, the couple fled — so fast that the shop had no chance to demand compensation, leaving staff with a huge cleanup. The cleaning employee could only remark wryly: "They got into their car so quickly, we couldn't even see their tail lights..."

Once the post went up, the shop's misfortune caught the attention of local netizens, who overwhelmingly sided with the owner. Such behavior, they argued, ruins the experience for everyone else — personal drama has no place in a shared space.

Other "Hit and Run" Incidents

Once the story gained traction, the owner — clearly holding back months of frustration — shared more "hit and run" stories from the shop: customers breaking plates and, rather than telling staff, piecing them back together and quietly slipping away, leaving shards that nearly injured the cleaner; customers snapping chair backs and footrests just to nail the perfect pose...

Readers flooded in with sympathy, and the coffee-throwing customer drew near-universal condemnation. If the photos don't turn out, take selfies yourself — why waste the coffee? Some asked what kind of society tolerates this...

Some tried to console the owner with humor: "Proof the chairs weren't good enough — time for replacements." The owner replied: "The broken chairs were made of cypress wood. If even those couldn't survive, all I can do is cry..." Another commented: "The owner should be running a boxing gym, not a coffee shop."

The Toll on Other Customers

This wasn't the first such story: Coffee Workshop previously covered a shop owner scolding influencers for staging revealing photo shoots — "You're annoying all the other customers!" In both comment sections, the anger was palpable from owners and customers alike. Nobody can understand those who treat a café purely as a photo studio, because the behavior genuinely degrades everyone else's experience and mood.

One comment from the original post sums it up: "If you don't even have basic public manners, you shouldn't leave the house!"

Image source: (FB) Bucolic Khaoyai. All comment section screenshots are system-generated translations.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

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