Chapel Hill Public Library Offers Pop-Up Coffee Shop from Local Vendors

“A lot of people like to curl up with a good book and a good cup of coffee,” said Chapel Hill Public Library assistant library director Meeghan Rosen.

And now the library is giving Chapel Hillians the chance to sample local coffee vendors while browsing reading material.

Rosen said three local vendors – Carrboro Coffee Roasters, Coco Bean Coffee Shop and Market Street Coffee – will each set up a temporary “pop-up” coffee shop in the library over the next few weeks.

“Each of them will provide their own equipment and furniture to operate from,” Rosen said. “And they’ll all be serving a selection of the items that they carry on their café menus.”

Rosen categorizes this as an experiment because she says there are questions about how successful this will ultimately be.

“To answer some questions like, how much demand is there for coffee at the library and when does it occur? What impact might there be on daily operations? What sorts of infrastructure changes might we need to make? And what does the public think about having coffee for sale at the library?”

Rosen adds that there are some things library officials can anticipate but also she acknowledges there are some factors that will be new along the way.

“We know what we know. And we know some of the things we don’t know. But we don’t know everything we don’t know,” Rosen said. “We’ll see what happens. I expect that we’ll have some announcements about next steps and moving forward probably right around the first of March.”

Rosen says the three vendors will be rotating through and the testing period will run through late February.

The first pop-up coffee shop was scheduled to begin Wednesday morning by Carrboro Coffee Roasters. The vendors will open when the library opens at nine o’clock on weekday mornings and 10 o’clock on the weekends.