Hi Ehiphany, double check the wording on your lease, if it states that you only have to pay for works to common parts of the building then you may not have to make any payments to the landlord. This happened to us with one of our shops, the landlords agent tried to charge us for a share of the work, when in fact the lease stated that we were only responsible for work on common parts, not the whole building. After a lot of argument and letters going back and forth, we ended up paying about a third of the original bill and saved ourselves a great deal of money!
I like the Still Roasting suggestion, I tried to come up with some ideas last night, something like 'Wake up and smell the coffee we are still here' or something like that may be fun to put up.
Our shops are in the Dorset area and we use directional signs to great effect in the town centres. In fact once we started, others soon followed our lead including McDonalds, who put out their own sign after we used ours for a couple of weeks. That tells me that we must have had some effect on their business to make them want to bother, so they definately do work! We see increases of about 30% in trade when the signs go out on busy days, they simply state Subway with a picture of a sub and have an arrow pointing to the shop!
Best of luck, let us know what you decide to do.
Cheers Sue