This is a photo of a bicycle shop with a coffee house in the front.
An
old lover of mine Catherine C. always refused to eat in hyphenated
restaurants. She meant Chinese-American, Indian-Chinese,
Filipino-American and Peruvian-Spanish as examples. She was right. I
never had a good meal in a hyphenated restaurant. I don't know why
Catherine's rule works, food itself is always a mix of ethnicities in its preparation and presentation.
But Catherine's hyphenated rule applies to most other businesses for a good reason. The bicycle shop with a coffee house can't last very long. While there are people who can have coffee while their bicycle is being repaired, that is a small, even tiny, segment of a bicycle shop's business.
The problem with putting two businesses together for any long period is that each business has clients with different needs. Those differences will grow over time. The initial value of lowering mutual rent will be over ridden by the needs of loyal customers as time goes by.
In
the bicycle-coffee combination, the bicycle person's love of bicycles
and the high mark-up on the kind of bikes that loyal customers like
will create a need for much more display space. And bicycle shops,
with new bikes, smell like rubber tires. Not like coffee.
The coffee shop, as it ages, will find its loyal customers want more pastry, more take-out service, more coffee bean sales, more Starbucks-like weird coffee drinks with the associated equipment, a different seating spatial arrangement with more high viewing seats and a few party tables, and possibly local live music. The bike shop 'environmental aura' will be less relevant; the good design, service and smell will matter more.