Cafés in Palmerston North

Palmerston North (also known as Palmy) is located in the North Island of Aotearoa/New Zealand. Palmy has a population of 84,639 people making it the 8th largest urban environment by population (StatsNZ, 2018). Being in the Manawatū-Whanganui region the city is 140km north-east of Wellington and 540km south of Auckland. At its inception Palmerston North was a small town that was originally reliant on a timber industry and then onto farming and has since remained an integral part to the economy and culture of Palmy today (Ministry for Culture and Heritage, 2022).

Palmy has a multitude of government agencies, research facilities, national companies, start-ups, and research institutes giving it is own corporate city feel. Palmy is also home to Massey University and has meant that the city is host to 9,000 students every year, labelling Palmy as a 'Student City' (Ministry for Culture and Heritage, 2022).

Cafés are small eating and drinking establishments with a limited menu. They usually focus on coffee and were a movement towards social gatherings and activity that didn't rely on alcohol (Britannica, 2022).

The emergence of modern cafés in Aotearoa/New Zealand started in the 1950s and since then they have continued to grow in popularity to the point of almost being an urban necessity. Cafés and the culture of cafés are staples for every city and Palmy is no different. It is difficult to imagine any city without the atmospheric buzz of cafés and the daily morning ritual of caffeinated beverages in takeaway cups. The smell of baked goods and hot breakfasts are almost essential to a walk through any city centre (Ministry for Culture and Heritage, 2022).

Cafés have cemented themselves into society and cities through both tangible and intangible aspects. TinToy Productions has a short video showing how cafés play into contemporary society and culture.

There are a multitude of aspects that can play into a café and a patrons experience such as the location, coffee, food, music, interior design, staff, etc. There is so much variance that there is a café for everyone. The cultural significance of cafés and the uniqueness of Palmerston North poses an interesting questions; as what are peoples favourite cafés in Palmy? And to go further in depth; how do people rate the qualities of their favourite café and what qualities are deemed to be the most important of a café?

Aims and Approaches: The aim of this project is to find out people’s favourite café to visit in Palmerston North. This was done through voluntarily asking friends and family to carry out a survey which consists of rating and ranking qualities of a café that appeal to as well as stating, locating (geographically on a map) and describing in a sentence or two why a certain café is your favourite.

The survey was open from the 3rd May to the 13th of June which allowed for a sufficient amount of time to get a good number of responses. Friends were asked over Facebook to fill out the survey through the link sent to them, meaning no survey was completed in person. We also didn’t post in the discussion forum as be localised to Palmerston North residents.

Survey Questions

Problems with the Survey An introduction paragraph about the survey and why it is being undertaken could've been placed at the top of the survey, as it would allow for more informative descriptions about participants experiences at the café as they would be more familiarised with the objective of the survey.

When locating your favourite café using the interactive map, some participants had trouble pinpointing the café. This occurred when looking up a café in the search bar and it wouldn't show up. A prime example of this systematic error is Sublime which had to be manually located leading to multiple points on the map. Another error that occurred with the geographic location was that three of the responses had a longitude and latitude of 0,0 but still stated that their favourite was Café Cuba.

The survey did not clarify or define the qualities in the ranking and rating systems, specifically traffic. Traffic was a confusing quality for people as they didn’t know if it meant the traffic present when they’re driving/walking to the café or the traffic/congestion surrounding the café.

Finally, there were communication issues between us and our participants with the interactive map not working as planned (as stated above) it would have been beneficial to leave contact details at the bottom of the survey so participants could get in contact if they wanted to inquire about the survey or to report a problem.

Recruitment of Participants Recruitment of participants was done through both project managers asking friends within Palmerston North to participate. No random participants or family members were used in the survey with the majority of the survey being made up of university students.

We had 21 participants, which for the project is allowed (minimum of 20 participants). However, this sample size isn’t large enough to representatively show people’s favourite café in Palmerston North – a minimum of 30 participants should be used if this project would be repeated

Due to there being limited variability among the participants age, occupation this data can be seen as unreliable due to this survey analysing a small demographic of Palmerston Norths population, young university students. As for next time it would be best to have a wider range of participants.

From this graph we can see that food has been determined to be the most important quality of a café followed by price, coffee, location and aesthetic and lastly traffic. It will be interesting to compare this to the favourite café ratings.

Café Cubas food being found to be pleasing/strongly pleasing aligns well with food being ranked the most important quality of a café. This makes sense with our survey findings, that the most desirable cafe would be the one which has the best food.

What is interesting is that the location of Café Cuba has been found to be mostly pleasing but that location is only the ranked 4th in importance.

The most highly rated qualities of Boho Café are aesthetic and traffic, which are also the qualities that were ranked to be the least important to a café. When looking at Boho Cafés location compared to the other cafes in Palmerston North it is evident that its traffic would be preferred to cafes such as Sublime due to it not being located outside of the CBD. However, the trade off to this may be that some find the location displeasing or out of the way.

Food at Sublime was found to be neutral which is interesting when it has been found that food was deemed to be the most important quality of a café. This result can be credited to the café not prioritising food and instead promoting coffee and aesthetic. Sublimes location is found to be strongly pleasing with it being 100m down the road from Café Cuba but yet Café Cubas location is only found to be pleasing at most.

While the price at Robert Harris is found to be displeasing, the food is found to be pleasing. Again this aligns with food being deemed to be the first most important quality with price only being the second most important. With more analysing of the data and a wider survey perhaps we could find the relationship and willing 'trade-off' between food satisfaction and price that determines a café being someones favourite.

While the survey was intuitive in the ways that it allowed for cafés be mapped, show both quantitate data (ratings and rankings) and qualitative data (comments) an issue with the findings is that there are only 21 respondents.

It's hard to uncover and tell a story when Café Cuba has a large proportion of the results at 6 responses, while many other cafés only having one response. Perhaps if we got more results from different demographics a more well rounded story could have been told.