Journo

While wandering around downtown Accordion City on Sunday afternoon, Wendy and I looked for a place to grab a quick lunch and ended up at Journo on King Street West and Widmer Street. It’s part-magazine store, part cafe and although I can’t quite put my finger on exactly why it seemed that way, it felt more like a Montreal establishment than a Toronto one (the big signs for their Van Houtte coffee certainly made it seem more Montreal-ish.)

It was a warm day, so went opted for a light lunch: a chicken salad sandwich and a pasta salad. The sandwich was merely okay, but the pasta salad was pretty good. In addition to salads and sandwiches, the coffee bar half of the store also has a large selection of cookies and pastries as well as Van Houtte coffees, both brewed and espresso machine-based.

The magazine section of Journo is devoted to what you’d expect to find in a decent magazine store: racks of magazines covering all sorts of interests, a selection of local, national and international newspapers and a small but interesting selection of bestselling paperbacks. It seems like a funkier version of stores like Great Canadian News and its sister in Francophone regions, Maison de la Presse. There’s a reason for this, which I’ll cover later on.

Journo also has some offerings that remind you that we’re living in the 21st century. There’s a section devoted to prepaid phone cards, but more interesting is the kiosk where you can download ringtones for your mobile phone and MP3s for your iPod. You can print photos from your camera’s memory chip, too. If you have a Rogers WiFi account (or sign up for one), you can access their hotspot.

The front section of Journo has about six or eight tables. Most of these tables were located indoors, but a couple were on its small street-facing patio, on the other side of a retractable wall. I didn’t check for power outlets near the tables, so I can’t report on their availability.

I did a little Googling and found that Journo is one of three stores being given a trial run by their owner, HDS Retail North America, a branch of Hachette Distribution Services which in turn is owned by the French media and high-tech group Lagardere. HDS Retail owns the Great Canadian News and Maison de la Presse magazine store chains. (Call me a business nerd if you must, but I sometimes find playing the “who owns whom” game interesting.)

According to this Globe and Mail article, Journo is an experiment. If these gene-splices of HDS’ core magazine store business with a cafe and a download kiosk prove to be successful, the plan is to open 100 Journos in Canada and expand into the United States.

Of note is the fact that the anti-smoking movement and smoking bans played a role in Journo’s creation. The article states that tobacco sales used to be the bread and butter of newsstands and that these merchants are now looking for “alternative revenue streams”, which is bafflegab used by suits that simply means “something else to sell”. In this case, it’s a switch of addictions: from tobacco to coffee.

If managed right, these guys could have a winning formula. In my opinion, the coffee they serve at Journo — Van Houtte — can easily go toe-to-toe against the brewed coffees at Starbucks or The Second Cup. Journo’s food selection has is at least as extensive as Starbucks or Second Cup’s, if not more so, and neither of those chains has a pop fridge for those who don’t want coffee, tea or overpriced designer juice. Books, magazines and newspapers are a natural match for cafes, and like its sister stores Great Canadian News and Maison de la Presse, Journo’s selection is pretty eclectic, especially considering that it’s a chain. On weekdays, Journo closes at 10 (which is comparable with most Starbucks and Second Cups), but on weekends it closes at midnight, well after most other coffee shops and magazine stores have turned out the lights.

They could probably do away with the download kiosk. Phones and MP3 players are too different and change too rapidly for it to be compatible with more than just a handful of models. I think they’d get a bigger bang for the buck by switching to free WiFi and capitalizing off the people who like taking their laptops to cafes; the maintenance costs would be cheaper, and when’s the last time you went to a cafe when there wasn’t at least one person with their laptop pulled out?

They might also do well to get rid of the flat-screen TVs hanging from the ceiling, which show the Pulse24 channel constantly (although with the sound turned down). They detract from the atmosphere, do nothing to lure in customers and are a waste of money.

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Next: More thoughts on Journo, Starbucks and its malcontents, “third places” and “cafe coding”.