Luxury Cafe Owner - Chapter 27 Theres No Such Thing As Bad Publicity

As Alan went upstairs to get ready for bed, his tweet set off a chain of events online.

Initially, most tweets at celebrity type figures go unnoticed unless the celebrity responds. Gerald normally wouldn’t let himself be used to hype up others like that, but when he saw the picture of the cappuccino he was stunned by the artistic ability and craft of Alan yet again.

He couldn’t help but retweet it. He also naturally followed Lux Cafe.

These simple two actions instantly brought Lux Cafe to the attention of many of Gerald’s followers.

A number of people instantly followed and tweeted at Lux Cafe. Most of these were the customers who had gone to the cafe today. The pics they tweeted included not just the coffee, but also the strange rules on the chalkboard, the luxurious decor, and of course the front of the cafe.

Tweet after tweet came in. Seeing how popular the cafe was, and how many people had apparently gone there after Gerald tweeted, his other followers grew curious and looked at the tweets and the pics.

Some of them responded to tweets asking if the photos were edited, others tweeted at Lux Cafe to ask when they were open.

Alan was busy getting ready to sleep, so he didn’t pay much attention to this. Tom had set his notification settings so he only received notifications when Tom tweeted at him. Knowing Alan’s personality, he’d turn off all notifications if he was getting blasted with tweets, so Tom took this step to make sure he would have a way to contact Alan. After all, Alan had already changed his number.

While Alan went to bed unaware of the fact that his popularity was growing, his account began to blow up on Twitter. Pretty soon the hashtag “luxcafe” was trending. Thousands of tweets had been sent, all started by the hundreds of customers he’d served.

His follower count had already passed ten thousand. While this was nothing to those big celebrities, for a new business to reach that amount in a single day was practically unheard of. The only time that happened was when they were being supported by large companies behind the scenes or had gone through extensive planning.

As a result, the conversation on Twitter began turning to conspiracy theories about how the business was actually owned by Gerald, or how the owner had paid Gerald money to make him advertise his account.

These theories were initially started by bored people with too much time on their hands who craved attention. However, there is no shortage of people like that on the internet, and the theory quickly became popular. Of course, as a result Lux Cafe stayed trending and Alan’s followers continued to increase.

This in turn fueled the conspiracy theorists. It was a truly vicious cycle.

Some people stood out to defend the cafe, others to defend Gerald. The ones who defended the cafe were the ones who had gone there that day, and who had initially tweeted at the cafe once they discovered the account. The ones defending Gerald were obviously his fans or people wishing to get on his good side.

They pointed out how Gerald had so much money that he would never need to lower himself to accept payment to advertise, especially if he didn’t actually believe in the product. Of course, they were completely correct.

However, the conspiracy theory had taken on a life of its own. The internet trolls had gotten ahold of it, drawn like sharks by the scent of blood in the water. Pretty soon tweets popped up claiming the photos were digitally altered, that the cappuccino didn’t actually look like that.

As things continued to spiral, Alan drifted into a blissful sleep. Even if he had known, he wouldn’t care too much. Instead he’d be thinking, “Yes please continue to drive up my popularity trolls.”

The next day, Alan got up and got ready as per usual. He went downstairs to make himself coffee before opening the cafe. As he sipped on his coffee in his favorite leather armchair, he opened his phone to check his Twitter account to see if Gerald had responded.

He was overwhelmed with notifications as he opened the app. At some point it had stopped counting how many he had. As he scrolled through them, he quickly gave up, realizing he didn’t have time to read each and every notification.

He checked his profile page and nearly dropped his phone out of fright. He’d jumped to over 50,000 followers overnight.

“What happened while I was sleeping?” He thought disbelievingly. He searched through his tweets and saw the initial tweet to his account from Gerald. Following that he noticed his initial boom in followers and the pics people had tweeted at him. He scrolled rapidly, until he reached when the conspiracy theory started to become the main focus of the conversation. He kept scrolling, reading occasional tweets.

By the time he reached the top 10 minutes had gone by, but he’d gained an understanding of what had gone on last night.

“Lucky,” He breathed to himself, doubting his own luck. There was a common expression that came to mind as he considered what had happened: there’s no such thing as bad publicity. So long as people were talking about his cafe it meant he would grow even more popular. Some would come to support the cafe, others would come to tear it down, and still others would come just to see what the commotion was about. Either way, he wouldn’t let any of them get away with full wallets.

He chuckled somewhat evilly as he daydreamed about the money he’d earn.

He quickly sent out a tweet. “If you doubt the hype, come check out the cafe for yourself. Put your money where your mouth is. We open in 30 minutes.”

The tweet instantly got retweeted, liked, and replied to by his many followers. Alan put his phone down in satisfaction, finished his coffee, and cleaned up in preparation for the day to come.