On Sunday, it was the final chance for residents in Minnesota to get their favored $8 coffee to go along with a $16 bacon-egg-cheese breakfast sandwich. Café Cerés is (was) a local chain of upper-end coffee shops in the metroplex that was favored by the locals, but April 13 saw the chain closing its doors. The business was brought to an end not by a rough economy but by its workers.
Last fall, the employees at the four locations voted to unionize. What you will see on display is a common theme found in the latest generation of workers, where the staff displays an overinflated sense of value and power. Forgetting they are low-skilled workers in the service industry, you see on display the fractured mindset of those who elevate their position from coffee hustlers to being regarded as “baristas.” You can dress up the title with any preferred Euro-euphemism all you like, it doesn’t change your role as a caffeine facilitator.
It is something we have become accustomed to over the years, emerging from the union-fed activism of $15-MW movement. This fast food burger flippers demand for high minimum wage salaries altered staffing sizes inside franchises and inspired the kiosk automation ordering methods becoming more common today. The sense that owners have no choice but to cave to these extortion methods frequently exposes the ignorance behind these emotional strong-arm attempts.
The Café Cerés saga displays many of the contemporary pitfalls of these organizing efforts. It used to be that unions were about job protections, better wages, and securing benefits. Nowadays that sounds more like the ground floor demands in negotiations. Frequently we hear of head-shaking demands of being included in the operational aspects of the business from those in entry-level positions. It is expected that the owners who invested at high risk and put in sweat equity for years have to heed the demands of 20-year-old Cody the barista between his time spent writing a screenplay.
Stupid is as stupid does. How these idiots think they have any say so at all is laughable.
They did have a say, now that greedy bastard has to sell the $8 coffee and $16 sandwiches elsewhere.