Jerusalem, September 16 – Stiff competition in the high-stakes hot beverage market has led to increasing violence as customers torn between nearly identical competing chains get caught up in it. This month alone, more than a dozen have been killed in the crossfire, with more than 50 others treated for injuries.
Startup enterprise Cofix took the Israeli coffee scene by storm last year after offering the beverage for five shekels, as little as a third of the price charged by established chains. Cofix also slashed the retail price on pastries, another staple of the industry, challenging the competition and reshaping the retail picture across the country. The chain has opened more than a dozen branches, with plans for many more, and has forced ubiquitous chains such as Aroma to cut their price for a fresh cuppa from 15 shekels to 8. Before long, other startups began working their way into the niche, with the nascent Cofizz vying for customers with Cofix in nearly every portion of downtown Jerusalem. The competition has turned violent at times, with employees and loyalists of each chain engaging in brawls and turning hoses of steamed milk and boiling water on one another in the fray.
As the violence increases, police have posted patrolmen in areas where Cofix and Cofiz shops lie within fifty meters of each other, as on the main downtown pedestrian mall around Ben Yehuda Street, but even that has proved an ineffective deterrent as just yesterday, a crowd of Cofizz customers and employees at the Ben Yehuda branch began taunting those waiting in line at the Cofix just around the corner on Luntz St. Despite admonitions from the patrolman to keep their distance, a fistfight broke out between the groups. The policeman, who suffered several scalds on his neck from a hurled cappuccino, called for backup, and within three minutes a dozen more officers arrived to separate the warring factions. Eleven people, including passers by, were hospitalized, and one later died of blood loss as a result of the cutthroat competition. Sixteen people were arrested.
The fight followed close on the heels of a similar incident on Friday when three Cofizz employees from a nearby branch were caught planting a bomb at the site of a soon-to-open Cofix on Kiach Street. Partisans of the latter chain set upon the would-be saboteurs, killing two and severely injuring the third. Seven people were arrested. Later that night, a fire that investigators are calling suspicious raged through the soon-to-open Cofix and caused extensive damage to it and to the electronics store next door. Earlier this month, the first Cofix-Cofizz engagement claimed the lives of 11 people at the Hadar Mall in the Talpiot section.
To police veterans, the conflict calls to mind the Cola Wars of the 1980’s, when the Pepsi Cola and Coca Cola companies engaged in a bitter battle to woo celebrity endorsements around the world. During those wars, Israel was staunchly in the Coca Cola camp, as Arab countries largely adhered to an embargo of companies that did business in Israel, and Pepsi was unavailable. Superintendent Carmel Kohler recalls reading of the riots in Atlanta, Georgia, when Coca Cola changed its formula to mimic Pepsi’s sweetness in the middle years of that decade. “I thanked God we were not part of that horror,” he says, “at least in terms of the violence. They killed, what, seven hundred people by the time it was over?”
As for an approach to the current violence, Superintendent Kohler says the police are working with community leaders to help defuse the situation, but that ultimately the individual companies will have to implement harsher discipline for workers who deviate from the job of serving coffee. “Vigilantism is seldom a good idea,” he says, recalling the lynching death earlier this year of an Arab teen in the aftermath of the kidnap and murder of three Jewish teens.
“That really should have been a wake-up call for the whole society,” he lamented. “But caffeine will have to do.”
“I wonder where I should get some?” he wondered.
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