Howdy, Partner: Now Bend Over

For two years, Kelsey McConnell worked at a popular coffee chain.  This is her story.

 

Previous to working at [redacted], I had: cleaned trash cans, floor mats and menu boards at a Taco Bell; been paid $2/hour for babysitting a nine year old who chased me around the kitchen wielding a knife; and done time behind a deli counter in Lake Tahoe, where vacationing San Franciscans would order absurdly complex sandwiches for children who really wanted American cheese on white bread, and who looked at me like I said I’d invented the internet when I nodded at their UCLA hats saying I’d gone there too.   

So how hard could slinging coffee be, right?  I drank enough of the stuff and [redacted] did have that 100 Best Places to Work decal in their windows.  Plus, I’d realized that my degree in American Literature and Culture was not immediately going to provide fiscal success and I needed a paycheck.

After the brainwashing session that passed for a barista orientation class, I was convinced that I had made a good decision.*  The introductory videos and slick brochures promised health, dental and vision insurance for all employees and that the big green monster cared less for cold hard profit than it did for warm squishy people. 

I’d grown into something of a “fuzzy headed liberal,” as my grandfather would say, through academic terms peppered with Youth Socialist Action and Environmental Coalition meetings and I felt fortunate to find myself a cog in a machine that distributed not just coffee, but the dream of a better tomorrow.  Unsold pastries were donated to local shelters (after being dumped one on top of another into a plastic trash bag), used coffee grounds given to customers for their gardens (until we were told that this “promotion” was over and were severely chastised for continuing to give away our grounds), a Fair Trade blend was rotated into the drip coffee (one day out of the month) and there were those health benefits (Health benefits! Health benefits! Health benefits!   After you had worked there for three months).

After I completed my 35 hours of workbook training exercises, I hit the floor and the scales began to fall unceremoniously from my eyes.  I started at [redacted] with a few more weeks of school ahead of me and the manager swore he’d work around my classes.  And then he scheduled me to work through not one but three of my final exams and questioned my commitment to the store when I asked for different shifts. 

I figured he was one bad apple… until I tried to transfer stores.  I’d been working for the company for just over three months, when I moved across town and found a store that was not only walking distance from my new place, it was also hiring.

The manager, an obese, Jewish redhead, who would periodically scream at customers in Yiddish and then laugh so hard he drooled, gave me a “try out” shift to “see what I was really made of.”  After showing up in regulation uniform and correctly reciting the 5 Enemies of Coffee (water, grind, proportion, air and light), I was told I was hired.  Technically, fired and rehired.

Since the tenure of my employment fell just short of the regulation “transfer period,” I was told I would have to quit at my original store and be rehired at the new one… which meant I would lose the health benefits for which I had just qualified and have to re-work the probationary three months to get them back.  The alternative being spending roughly as much on gas as I would make in a shift (and gas was still under $2 /gallon back then) just to get to and from work, I acquiesced, praying that my fair health and scratched-up glasses would survive another three uninsured months.

*I later learned that orientation officiate reported back to store managers, 1984-style, on how well their newbies had followed dress code and participated in exercises.

Comments

[Showtime]

This is downright creepy. I also didn't know that light was the enemy of coffee. Can't say I'm surprised though.