Berkeley, Calif. –– Telegraph Avenue is no stranger to a continuous turnover of culinary businesses trying to balance extravagant commercial rent and an irritating, bookwormy client-base. One business, set to open on the corner of Telegraph and Durant Ave, will debut a new, eyebrow-raising item: a drink called “Boba.”
Pie-eyed Chris Endlow, the store’s proprietor, moved to Berkeley in early 2023 with the hopes of striking it big on the frontier of overpriced drinks. To his delight, a dream he had in May about anxious Berkeley students spurred him to invent a “100% original beverage,” as his website bobaguy.tv repeatedly quotes.
“I dreamt students were distracting themselves from their stressful problem set by throwing dark marbles into a foggy translucent bin where they accumulated picturesquely. Then, they would retrieve their marbles by placing a garden hose in the receptacle, and sucking with full force until the balls were in their mouths. The students wasted so much time that they were forced to plagiarize the entire assignment, and THIS gave me the idea to open a shop to sell ‘Boba’ – which is completely new, rather than something that may or may not have originated in Taiwan in the 1980s, nor something that could also already be sold next door, or across the street, or down the street,” snorted Endlow, glancing towards Durant.
A new drink in town prompts opinions from skeptics and preemptive fans alike. Haas ’21 graduate Charlie Samuel claimed he isn’t phased by the addition.
“I’m confused. It’s the opposite of a ‘new drink in town.’ There’s literally a boba shop right next door. And multiple across the street. This is not ‘experimental,’ this is some fucked-up beverage monoculture, or as I used to say in my only two Haas classes that used numbers: supply and demand. What’s ‘experimental’ is trying to enter an oversupplied market and compete with established businesses RIGHT NEXT DOOR. What would be great is if a place opened that sold affordable groceries to the student population,” said Samuel, before noting privately that he now works as a development liaison for Whole Foods.
Other frequent passersby in Southside seem generally indifferent, with caveats. One such apathetic local is senior Doe Pamin, who had all of 30 seconds to comment before running to class.
“Caffeine?” Pamin asked when questioned about the new business. “Caffeine? Caffeine. How much caffeine? New place for caffeine. Remember to sleep. $9 dollar caffeine is not unreasonable. Make sure to Snackpass it.”
While tension obviously rages surrounding the boba shop’s viability, city planning faculty from the College of Environmental Design (CED) have announced the grand opening of a new research institute: Center for Little Iced Drink Studies. With funding from Goldman-Sachs, the program intends to collaborate with Economics researchers to isolate what they’ve coined the “Tapioca Coefficient,” a metric theoretically capable of predicting the maximum-efficient saturation of caffeine-centered businesses in a college town.