Eight Years of Boss Barista

Marking a significant milestone for Boss Barista by reflecting on the present moment.

Photo by Maryna Nikolaieva on Unsplash

Last year, when I wrote a piece commemorating Boss Barista’s seventh anniversary, the mood was light and jovial. I paid homage to my favorite basketball podcast, Six Trophies, and wrote a post in the style of the show. It covered the year’s silly coffee trends, like robot baristas, and mocked former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who had a freakout about being called a billionaire in front of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

It’s now been just over eight years since Boss Barista began, on February 1, 2017. Marking an anniversary like this one generally feels like an invitation to celebrate and reflect on how this project has grown and changed. But this year, celebrating feels fucked-up. Instead, I’m preoccupied by questions that I don’t have the answers to.

Questions like: What does the threat of Trump’s tariffs mean for the future of coffee?

Or, what will happen to the burgeoning labor movement within the coffee and service sector? (As I’m writing this, the current administration is attempting to slash worker protections for federal employees, while multiple members of the National Labor Relations Board have been fired.)

Or, how will stripping away climate protections impact coffee’s future, given that it is a crop that has already been highly impacted by unpredictable weather patterns?

What about coffee service workers, many of whom identify as members of marginalized groups? How will they be impacted? What about guns and public spaces? What happens if someone gets injured at work? What happens if they’re harassed? Discriminated against?

Protections that attempt to curb these behaviors are currently being stripped away. Oligarchs are moving to seize power while democracy is being dismantled in real time. We are witnessing multiple overlapping attempts to make people powerless.

COFFEE AND POWER

I often describe Boss Barista as a newsletter about a thing you drink every day—coffee—and all the issues surrounding it. In Boss Barista’s early years, as I recently reflected, that mainly meant coffee and feminism.

As time has passed, the scope of these articles has expanded to more broadly question systems of power, and how they shape our relationship to coffee.

Power touches every facet of our lives: It’s the reason so many bosses and managers fight against their employees when they unionize, even though they profess to “care” about their workers. It’s the reason why big companies like Nestlé buy up smaller coffee brands. It’s the reason why trade organizations and multinational companies do little to address the problem of coffee farmers’ depressed wages, no matter how often the issue is raised.

Power is the point; the point is to hold onto power. And while this dynamic is deeply ingrained in coffee—a product that relies on colonial structures and the extraction of value from Black and Brown people in the Global South—it also impacts nearly every facet of our lives.

So yes, this is a newsletter about coffee. But it’s also not.

If I have one directive to share today, it’s to fight the consolidation of power in any form you see it. Question why a system operates the way it does; push back on people who are interested in keeping salaries opaque; ask your anti-union friend what they mean when they call a union a “third party.” Take stock of your capabilities and take a risk if you can—power grabs rely on our unwillingness to challenge them. While pushing back is not always viable, I hope you at least feel encouraged to look for spaces of resistance.

A Numbers Update

As I write this (it’s 8:43 CST on February 3, 2025), Boss Barista has 3,874 subscribers and 81 paid subscribers. Around this time last year, I had about 800 fewer readers but 20 more paid subscribers. Shrug. My open rate (around 40%) has stayed relatively stable, and most articles get about ~2,500 views. You can see that breakdown here:

I also wanted to include this line graph that charts subscribers over time. I officially started this newsletter in 2019 (Boss Barista existed solely as a podcast for its first two years), and I thought it’d be interesting to break down some of the key inflection points:

The first big bump in subscribers happened in February 2021. I went from ~400 to 600 subscribers after I wrote a piece telling folks that they should absolutely not open a coffee shop. Don’t! This piece is still one of my favorites to revisit, because the number of people who casually float the idea of opening a coffee shop like it’s buying a cardigan is confounding—this is not some hobby business. You will fail if you treat it as such.

The second happened in August 2021, when Alicia Kennedy shouted out Boss Barista on her newsletter roundup. It’s incredibly humbling when other food writers recognize your work.

Another happened in April 2022, when I wrote what I think is one of my best pieces, about how pizza parties became synonymous with bad bosses. In the future, I’d like to explore how food is weaponized, and how things like meme culture contribute to this association, in an academic context.

A fourth happened in October 2022, when I wrote about the elusive “fourth wave of coffee.” Spoiler alert: It hasn’t happened. My colleague James Hoffmann retweeted a link to this piece, which brought in new readers. Today, it’s still among Boss Barista’s most-read stories.

After that, the line remained pretty steady until January 2025, when I noticed a significant uptick. (I’ve gained, like, 300 subscribers in three weeks; I usually see only one or two new signups per day.) Some of these may be bots, but I also think it’s because my colleague and past podcast guest Morgan Eckroth has put Boss Barista on their recommended list. I also saw a good response to my latest piece on olive oil disruptor brands’ use of fear-based marketing language.

It’s cool to see Boss Barista grow! I have been shying away from asking readers to convert to paid subscriptions recently, partly because my ongoing masters degree has impacted my schedule and partly because asking people to support my work makes me nauseous. Maybe someone can talk me into getting over myself; maybe the number of subscribers means I can think about a very carefully considered sponsorship?

Until then, thank you so much for reading, and please leave a comment below to say hi.