“If I could start over,” said Ko Jang-su, “I would do anything but open a cafe.”
Mr. Ko’s cafe is one of the busiest coffee shops in his densely populated neighborhood of Seoul. Still, on weekday mornings it sits empty.
It is not hard to understand why: Mr. Ko has more than 50 competitors nearby, and in South Korea, that is hardly unusual. In Seoul, the density of cafes rivals that of Paris.
The passion for coffee — one national survey suggested that Koreans now reach for it more often than rice — has bred a fantasy among some hoping to cash in and escape the 9-to-5 grind: Why not open a cafe of their own?
The trend caught on fast, as trends often do in South Korea. Thousands of coffee shops open each year. But just as quickly, thousands disappear.
When Mr. Ko opened his cafe in the Sillim neighborhood of southern Seoul in 2016, the competition wasn’t as stiff. There were just two other coffee shops within a few hundred feet.
Since then, cafes have become ubiquitous in the cities of South Korea, the number doubling nationwide over the past six years. There are 80,000 shops for a population of 51 million, with more than 10,000 in Seoul alone.
San Francisco, another city with a strong coffee culture, doesn’t come close to a single district in Seoul, bustling Gangnam.
The cafe boom has been driven by South Koreans’ chase for alternatives to the tough job market, and by consumers’ craving for trend-setting drinks, desserts and interior design, according to cafe owners.
But in South Korea, when a novelty catches on, it can quickly become a national phenomenon — like instant photo booths and personal color analysis services. Waves of business spring up to meet the demand, then the market becomes saturated.
Coffee was introduced to the Korean Peninsula in the late 19th century. Initially a luxury product, it later spread to people in the middle and working classes who came across instant coffee powder in U.S. military rations after the fighting stopped in the Korean War.
Soon, South Korea started producing its own instant mixes. They remain hugely popular.
Starbucks arrived in the late 1990s, and by the 2000s, the Americano had become one of its best-selling drinks. Today, the iced Americano, nicknamed “ah-ah” in Korean, is a sort of unofficial national beverage.
But to South Koreans, coffee shops mean much more than just caffeine.
Many live in small apartments, often with family members, making it difficult to invite people over. Cafes offer spaces where couples can linger after dinner, old friends can catch up, students can study late into the night, and anyone can sit alone and scroll without being bothered.
Faced with a stagnant job market and a harsh office culture, some South Koreans see opening a shop as a path to independence. The cafes have lower startup costs than some other popular options like bars and restaurants, and don’t require a special barista license.
Trend-chasing cafe hoppers determined to get in early on the next “it” place and post about it to Instagram often mill in front of newly opened shops. That has added to the illusion of easy money.
“People see long lines form in front of other cafes and think running one is simple,” said Mr. Ko, who is also chairman of the national Cafe Owner Cooperative Organization. “But the work is grueling, and the profits are slim.”
Choi Seon-wook, a cafe consultant who has helped open more than a thousand coffee shops, said that the vast majority of people entering the business were unprepared. “They have never run a coffee shop, or their experience is limited to part-time work as a barista,” he said.
Many owners net just $2,700 to $3,400 a month — a little over the minimum wage. And that’s in return for putting in more than 13 hours a day, Mr. Choi said.
And many quit once their first leases expire, he said, after just a year or two. As more coffee shops open, their life span is getting shorter.
It is not enough just to serve good coffee, said Jang Eun-seok, who managed Cafe Baum 758, a midsize cafe near a major university and a research institute in northeastern Seoul, for four years. Owners need to know marketing, interior design and menu development, so they can tailor to the latest trends, he said.
In today’s social-media driven culture, the success of a cafe often hinges more on how well it photographs — and how many views posts about it get — than what it serves. But standing out is no easy feat. Interior design trends catch on quickly, leading many shops to adopt a similar aesthetic.
This also means that many cafes may not pay very much attention to the quality of the actual drink, Mr. Choi said.
On top of that, cafe owners also face growing pressure from low-cost franchises, though even those franchises can struggle to maintain margins as the cost of living and the price of coffee beans rise.
Mr. Jang said that five of the seven cafes he worked at over the past decade no longer existed. “I’ve often felt hopeless and wondered if I would be able to keep working as a barista,” he said.
Now, there are YouTube videos dedicated to discouraging people from opening cafes. In one of them, Kwon Seong-jun, a celebrity chef who won Netflix’s hit cooking competition show “Culinary Class Wars,” recounts his own failure in the cafe business and counsels others against trying.
Still, new entrepreneurs continue to enter the market thinking they might be the lucky ones. As Mr. Ko sat in his nearly empty Seoul coffee shop, he had some advice.
“A cafe is not a place to get rich,” he said. “It’s just a place to go and drink coffee.”
About the data
The data of coffee shops in South Korea is released by Korea Local Information Research & Development Institute, a government-affiliated institute that maintains a national database of registered businesses. The analysis includes records from February 1964 through June 2025.
The street featured in the middle of the top of the story is Gangnam-daero in Seoul. We photographed each storefront and stitched the images into composite images for each side of the street. The bottom strip is flipped horizontally to maintain the correct left-to-right order of shops on both sides of the street.
