Seven Years of Boss Barista

To commemorate the milestone, here are the coffee stories that captured my attention in 2023.

Photo by Quinten de Graaf on Unsplash

My new favorite podcast is Six Trophies, hosted by Jason Concepcion and Shea Serrano. Every week, Jason and Shea talk about basketball and use pop culture references to discuss what happened in the NBA over the past seven days. They also hand out six metaphorical trophies per episode. 

For example, the “Denzel Washington in ‘Training Day’” trophy goes to the best thing that happened that week. And the “Dominic Toretto ‘I live my life a quarter mile at a time’” trophy—a reference from the “Fast and the Furious” movies (I’m sorry to admit I had to look this up; I’ve never watched them)—is, according to Jason and Shea, “given out to someone who made a short-term decision with no regard for future consequence that week.” This podcast makes me laugh and lets me indulge my newfound love of basketball without feeling like I need to be a stat wizard or a longtime NBA head. 

Today is Boss Barista’s seventh birthday. Boss Barista started as a podcast (learn more about its early days here), but launching this newsletter in 2019 made the project feel more real and substantive, and has allowed me to connect with an entirely new audience. To commemorate this moment, I thought I’d borrow from Six Trophies and use the podcast’s format to discuss six coffee stories that have captivated me, made me hopeful, or made me angry in the past year. (Spoiler alert: Most of them made me angry.)

Before we get into that, I also wanted to say a big thank to everyone who has read my newsletter and listened to the podcast, and who has supported Boss Barista throughout its evolution. Scroll down to look at some of the latest stats, including how much Boss Barista has grown over the last year. (And do listen to Six Trophies, even if you don’t watch basketball—Jason and Shea are so funny and make the sport feel accessible. I wish they were my friends.)

The “‘Corporate needs you to find the difference between this picture and this picture.’ ‘They’re the same picture.’” trophy goes to...

Bosses calling unions “third parties”! 

Over the last year, I talked a lot about anti-union rhetoric, mostly because I saw so much flawed logic being flung around. I even fed some of the common anti-union arguments into ChatGPT to point out logical fallacies in claims like, “Your workplace doesn’t need a union if your boss is good” (a red herring) or “The union was started by disgruntled employees” (an ad hominem argument). 

In nearly every anti-union effort I came across, I saw leadership and management trying to separate “the union” from “the workers,” often calling unions “third parties” to create distance. This is a common tactic weaponized by bosses everywhere. Like Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who called Starbucks Workers United, which now comprises over 380 unionized stores, a “third party.” Or Madison Sourdough owner Andrew Hutchison, who told the Cap Times that he was opposed to a union coming between him and his workers, despite a majority of those workers opting for union representation. (You can find more updates about that union effort here and here, as well as in the podcast.)

Calling a union “a third party” is like calling your relationship with your partner or an intramural team “a third party.” The group or unit exists because of the people who choose to be part of it—it’s not some separate entity that appears out of nowhere. In 2024, stop saying that unions are third parties. 

“The Ron Swanson eating a banana” trophy goes to…

Espresso martinis! 

In an attempt to either lose all my readers—or just troll them—I wrote about how I think espresso martinis are gross.

A lot of you had feelings about this. I still stand behind it. 

The “LeBron James flip phone” trophy goes to…

Dairy milk dunking on plant milk!

Since I’m borrowing from an NBA podcast, I had to sneak in one basketball-related reference.

LeBron James is incredible and I love him so much—he is absolutely not dated (although every time he shows up on a basketball court, people feel the need to comment on his age—he just turned 39 and he’s still a top ten player in the NBA). Instead, this trophy is about the cell phone, a dated piece of technology, similar to dairy milk’s attitude towards plant milk.

This year, I wrote a story about how cringe it is that dairy milk continues to juxtapose itself against plant milk and claim that dairy-based milks are “real milk.”

In May of 2023, a dairy milk group hired Aubrey Plaza, fresh off her role in season two of “The White Lotus,” to star in an ad for Wood Milk, a spoof meant to poke fun at plant milk. Essentially, the video was designed to posit plant milks as twee and hipster-ish, despite the fact that a majority of the world is lactose-intolerant and plant milks are not some new invention: across the globe, people have been using nuts and plants to make milk for centuries. Dairy milk needs to get with the picture!

The “‘I feel bad for you.’ ‘I don’t think about you at all.’” trophy goes to...

Robot baristas!  

Firstly, this is my favorite meme of all time.

Secondly, I might be contradicting the spirit of this trophy because I did write more than one piece on robot baristas in 2023. But the TL;DR is that I don’t think of robot baristas as threats, and they do not inspire the sort of worry in me that the feverish coverage of them seems to want to spark. 

To be clear, I do think there are a lot of ill-informed and ill-intentioned people out there who truly believe robots can and should replace human beings. But I’m pretty confident that they’re wrong, and, as I argued in one of my pieces, treating robots as one-to-one replacements for human workers is limiting and myopic. 

The “‘I hated her so much... it-it- the f - it -flam - flames. Flames, on the side of my face, breathing-breathl- heaving breaths’” trophy goes to...

Two weeks’ notice! 

Truly, I could have picked many candidates for this trophy. In 2023, the Boss Barista stories that seemed to resonate the most were about we’re fed up with: from “time to lean, time to clean” to feeling like we always need to expand to find success. But the story that felt the stickiest to me was a piece I wrote encouraging folks to think about not giving two weeks’ notice when they quit their jobs. 

This article felt deeply uncomfortable to write, but it also sparked a deep-seated anger in me about how we admonish—and sometimes criminalize—the actions of individuals versus corporations and businesses, who seem to face negligible consequences when they do something wrong. Why can a CVS worker face jail time for stealing from work, but the corporation faces few, if any, consequences for stealing wages from hundreds of workers? Make it make sense!

I also had several people reach out and tell me that they thought two weeks’ notice was mandatory. It’s wild (and revealing) how much we’ve internalized this very arbitrary practice, which is not mandated by law and which only serves employers. We don’t owe businesses anything—don’t let social norms tell you otherwise. 

The “Kendall Roy: ‘I AM THE ELDEST BOY’” trophy goes to...

Howard Schultz, for getting mad at being called a billionaire!

(Apologies for this green screen video of arguably the best moment in television; it’s the only version I could find of this quote.)

Howard Schultz was asked to testify in front of Congress about Starbucks’ alleged anti-union behaviors. Schultz declined, but then agreed to appear in front of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions once it became clear the committee would subpoena him.

We broke down the most salient points of his testimony in two parts (here and here). Schultz’s behavior and attitude towards the union effort have been abhorrent, and it was unsurprising that Republican committee members were mostly congratulatory of him. Democrats were more critical, including Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota. Perhaps my favorite line of the hearing comes from her: 

“Honestly, it sounds like you are personally offended or insulted that anyone would question you or your company.” 

During Smith’s questioning, Schultz had his meltdown: “This billionaire nickname, let’s get to it,” he says. Then, later, he goes, “Yes, I have billions of dollars. I earned it. Nobody gave it to me.” I’d argue that the hundreds of thousands of people who have worked for Starbucks had a hand in giving him that money, but what do I know? 

A Numbers Update

Here’s a screenshot taken today (I’m writing this in the very early morning of February 1, 2024).

This time last year, the newsletter had 2,332 subscribers and 106 paid subscribers, so we’ve added about two new free subscribers daily, give or take, over the last year. I like setting goals, but I also hate thinking about growth (and equating growth with success). That said, I would still like to see the newsletter become more sustainable through more subscribers—and by either converting more readers to a paid model or using subscriber numbers to discuss sponsorship. I’m not yet sure what that looks like.

I also think sustainability is flexible. What if I could sell more of the articles I write to other outlets? What if I could combine paid journalism work with what I publish here? I think there are various ways to approach this, which I’ll be exploring more in the future.

In terms of the podcast, I’ve always known that podcast metrics are hard to quantify, but I do want to impress on subscribers that Boss Barista is still a niche show. Many folks seem surprised when I tell them that, at best, a few hundred people listen regularly. And that makes me wonder: Is a podcast the best way for me to continue doing this work? The podcast is also what takes me the longest to make, so it would make sense for me to pare it back.

What do you think about that—or anything else in this post? Even if you just want to say hi, I’d love to hear from you. And thank you again for being here with me for the last seven years.