ELMIRA, N.Y. (WETM) — The Downtown Grind coffee shop in downtown Elmira has been around since November of 2018, and this month marks five years for the business.

Store manager, Iris Fannin, mentioned that the store has been through a lot, including getting through the COVID-19 pandemic, and said that maintaining good customer service will keep the business functioning.

“The big thing for us is customer service, you know. I really like to get to know my customers, it’s very important to me,” said Fannin. “I’ve met so many amazing people through the community here that way. Customers are the most important thing here. I live to make sure that everybody is happy, taken care of. If anybody ever has an issue, I make sure I do whatever I can to solve it for them.”

Fannin says being creative with beverages has allowed the workers to know what works and what doesn’t and mentioned that, the more the city of Elmira does downtown, the more it helps its business.

“Anytime that there’s events downtown, it’s going to bring people in, especially when they brought the street painting festival back down to Water and North Main this year. It was one of our biggest days that we’ve had since we opened was during the street painting festival. It just gets people downtown,” said Fannin. “A lot of people don’t walk around downtown so people that don’t normally do that come down this way and they’re still discovering us even though we’ve been here for a few years. It’s awesome to see that people are still finding us out and coming back to visit again.”

This Sunday, Nov. 19, the shop will be giving away free birthday cake pops for the first 50 guests and will also have a special on birthday cake lattes to celebrate.