By Noah Stern:
The mid-sized city of Ann Arbor, Michigan is most well-known for being the home of one of the largest public universities in the country, the University of Michigan. Running a small business in a designated “college town” comes with many benefits, but, as John and Sandy Becker soon found out, the fickle nature of the college demographic can lead to potentially catastrophic consequences.
The Beckers purchased a former Pizza Hut location just off the UM campus. They refurbished and remodeled it and turned the building into a cafe/bookstore called ‘The Kitty Cat Coffee Corner.’
Right away, many students had problems parting with the beloved Pizza Hut location and the whimsical nature of the new cafe did nothing to ease their pain. Our Milking Cat field reporters were able to speak with two fraternity brothers to figure out what caused the Beckers to lose a reported $65,000 of their own money. When questioned, Chad “The Hammer” Markowitz had this to say:
“Yeah I mean right off the bat we really got caught off guard once The Hut went out of business. Then, literally like two days later, these two boomers show up and set up the Pussy Cat Kitty Corner or some [expletive] and expect everyone to be excited.”
Derek “Deez Nuts” Nuttinger then chimed in, saying “Next time I’m sitting in my room completely sloshed at 3 a.m. and I try to order some [expletive] Pizza Hut and one of these two goons answers the phone telling me how I woke them up and now they have to ‘turn John’s sleep apnea machine back on’ I’m gonna lose my [expletive].”
The pair’s fraternity, Sigma Gamma Epsilon, quickly launched a social media smear campaign declaring the Kitty Cat Coffee Corner to officially have “bad vibes.”
Markowitz noted, “On top of all the Pizza Hut stuff, have you guys actually been in there? There’s like 30 intricate, expensive handmade clocks all shaped like cats. On top of that, I don’t think they realize how close they are to the campus library. It’s like laughably convenient. I’ve never seen anyone go into their bookshop. They’ve made some astoundingly poor business decisions.”
Nuttinger elaborated on the eccentric nature of the establishment: “They hired this one kid to stand outside the store dressed as a giant book. But the book was about the Flint water crisis, which was in really poor taste. My professor in Entrepreneurship 101 is gonna do a whole unit called ‘How Bad the Beckers Screwed Up.’”
Most other students contend that it came as no surprise to them that the cafe was definitively deemed to carry bad vibes and was thus driven entirely out of business.
The Beckers could not be reached for comment.