The Business of Being a Regular

There’s a coffee shop I go to at least three times a week. By now, most of the people working there know my order. I know where I like to sit, roughly how busy it’ll be depending on the time, and usually recognize a few people when I walk in.

The coffee is good, which obviously matters. But there are plenty of places I could get good coffee.

At some point it just became my coffee shop.

That’s a pretty ordinary thing, but I’ve started thinking there’s more business wrapped up in that feeling than we usually give it credit for.

For consumer businesses built around frequency- coffee shops, restaurants, gyms, salons- repeat revenue is often the lifeline. An occasional customer can like you. A regular can start to make the economics work. They show up predictably, require less convincing, tend to forgive the occasional mistake, and aren’t being reacquired every time they walk through the door.

In a business without subscriptions, regulars are about as close as you can get to recurring revenue.

But I don’t think frequency alone is what creates them.

Frequency vs. authenticity

Coffee shops and fast-casual restaurants have spent years getting very good at manufacturing frequency.

Points. Stars. Free drinks. Streaks. Status levels. Personalized offers.

And the scale of those programs shows why. Starbucks said its Rewards members accounted for nearly 60% of U.S. company-operated revenue in fiscal 2025. When that much of the business is coming from returning customers, even getting someone to visit slightly more often can be worth a lot.

Still, I can earn points somewhere every morning without ever feeling attached to the place.

That feels like the difference between frequency and authenticity.

I recently read a piece from the owner of Speak of the Devil, a neighborhood bar in Lorain, Ohio. He talks about customers who come every Friday for years and remain great customers, while someone who comes far less often can somehow become part of the fabric of the bar.

“Not that we missed your business. We missed you.”

That’s probably a better definition of a regular than anything sitting inside a CRM.

It’s not purely how often you come in. There’s been enough interaction over time that the business starts to represent a person, a conversation, a routine, maybe even a certain period of your life.

That’s harder to put into a loyalty program.

And it’s where I think the economics get more interesting.

A regular doesn’t just create higher lifetime value. They make the experience better.

Walk into a coffee shop where nobody knows anyone and it can feel like a room where people happen to be buying coffee. Walk into one where a few customers get greeted by name, someone behind the counter knows what they’re about to order, and two people recognize each other from being there every morning, and the place feels different before you’ve bought anything.

The regulars are part of the atmosphere.

They’re giving the business some of its identity without being employees or owners. A newcomer sees that people return. The staff has people they actually know rather than a constant stream of transactions. Conversations carry over from one day to the next. Eventually the brand starts to represent those interactions as much as whatever was designed into the logo, menu, or space.

In his piece, the Speak of the Devil owner puts it another way:

“Regulars don’t just find a place – over time, without ever intending to, they help to create one.”

I think that’s the piece loyalty programs can’t quite capture.

They can increase visit frequency. They can improve retention and make demand more predictable. Those are real and valuable outcomes.

But the best version of loyalty is probably when the business stops needing to constantly remind you to come back.

You’ve attached some emotion to it.

When the customer becomes part of the product

This also crosses into brand more than I initially thought.

We usually talk about brand as something the company creates and the customer responds to. With businesses built around physical places, I think it can run the other direction too.

The customers help create the brand other customers experience.

That’s especially true for hospitality. A restaurant with the perfect interior but no energy still feels empty. A neighborhood bar can have nothing particularly exceptional about the furniture and feel impossible to recreate because of who occupies the stools.

The business has built something valuable, but it doesn’t entirely own it.

That can also go too far. Places that are overly oriented around their regulars can feel closed off. What feels like home to ten people can feel like someone else’s living room to the eleventh.

The best places seem to manage both. They make regulars feel known without making first-time customers feel like outsiders.

That’s a real operating skill, and probably an underrated part of building a consumer brand.

Starbucks is an interesting scaled version of the same tension. Its loyalty infrastructure is enormous, but the company is also investing again in café seating, staffing, and the in-store experience. Even with one of the most sophisticated consumer loyalty systems in the world, there’s still value in the physical place and the human interaction around the transaction.

Software can remember my order.

Points can give me a reason to come back tomorrow.

Neither necessarily makes somewhere feel like my spot.

Maybe sometimes it really is just the coffee. The product still has to be good enough to earn the second visit.

But after the tenth or twentieth visit, something else can start compounding. You know the place, the place knows you, and eventually coming back isn’t really a decision anymore.

For a business, that’s loyalty.

For the customer, it just feels familiar.