Terra Bite Lounge

You can pay anything you like at the Terra Bite Lounge in Kirkland, Washington, reports Amy Roe in The Seattle Times (2/6/07). No prices are listed on the menu — it’s up to the cafe’s customers to decide how much to pay, or whether to pay at all. “Does it really matter to any of our patrons … whether they pay a dollar or three dollars or five dollars?” says Ervin Peretz, a Google programmer who scraped together the dough to start a cafe that he says sells “good karma” as much as coffee and snacks. His bet is that “he can finesse the largesse of well-off latte lovers to cover the tabs of the less fortunate.”

Ervin says he got the idea while drinking at a bar in Saigon, and named the place as “a play on the tech term ‘terabyte,’ a trillion bytes, as well as a reference to earth and food.” As he explains: “People want something different. They want simplicity … They want to be taken to a new place, and they want to contribute something.” One patron, Tonja Maciolek, says she likes the idea “because she’s sensitive to price and would prefer to name her own, even it ended up being the same.” She contributed $4 for a bagel with cream cheese and coffee.

Kate Lewis, a high school student, says she’d pay extra for the privilege of setting her own price. "It’s kind of like a social experiment," she says. Which makes Chris Allar, slightly crazy. "It’s always hard to see if you paid too much or too little," he says, admitting to a certain anxiety over that. But Ervin thinks he’s onto something — since opening late last year he’s served an average of 80 customers a day, each of whom has paid an average of $3. He says he needs about 100 a day to break even. If that doesn’t happen, he says his alternative is pretty obvious: "If it turned out that 20 percent of the population were dishonest, we could just put in a cash register," he says. ~ Tim Manners, editor