BOSS BARISTA
BOSS BARISTA
What Baristas Actually Make with Adam JacksonBey and Valorie Clark
0:00
-38:32

What Baristas Actually Make with Adam JacksonBey and Valorie Clark

The average wage for baristas is $14 per hour—but many are only scheduled to work 26 hours a week. Go Fund Bean representatives discuss barista wages and more.

My guests today are Adam JacksonBey and Valorie Clark, two members of Go Fund Bean, a non-profit organization born during the pandemic when thousands of hourly coffee workers—baristas and beyond—were laid off. Go Fund Bean seeks to empower hourly coffee workers through mentoring programs, grant programs, and most recently, through a comprehensive salary survey: hundreds of coffee workers responded anonymously to their survey, answering questions like what their hourly wages were, how much they made in tips, and if they received any benefits at work.

You might recognize Adam and Valorie: both have been guests on the show before but are here today to break down some of the survey's surprising—and not-so-surprising—findings. From discovering substantial gaps in pay between hourly and salaried workers to uncovering that most baristas are only getting scheduled 26 hours of work a week, this survey will make you rethink how coffee workers get paid and how we think about and value service work. Here are Adam and Valorie.

Ashley: All right, friends, I have two people who have been on the show before. I have Valorie Clark and Adam JacksonBey of Go Fund Bean—not Go Fund Me, GoFund Bean. Maybe I'll include the clip where I said this wrong as an audio extra for you folks later.

Valorie and Adam, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me.

Valorie: Oh my gosh, hi, thanks for having us.

Adam: Yeah, thank you.

Ashley: I want to talk specifically about a survey that you folks conducted as part of Go Fund Bean. You did a pretty wide-sweeping wage survey for baristas—you released the data a couple of days ago, maybe a couple weeks ago by the time this goes to air, and there was some really big findings in there that we're gonna break down.

We're gonna talk about all the data that you folks compiled, but I wanna step backwards a little bit and ask what prompted you folks to do this wage survey?

Adam: Do you want me to go, Valorie?

Valorie: Yeah, go for it.

Adam: So, about a year before the pandemic started—because that's how I take keep track of time now—around the country, a lot of different places did wage surveys. I don't remember who started it, but just trying to find out where wages were for baristas in the area and post-pandemic, obviously when GFB started.

This was something we wanted to incorporate on a national level because we had a national voice and and we were able to get people all around the country, not just in specific areas in the country. So we wanted to see how much baristas were getting paid, [how much] hourly coffee workers were getting paid, whether that's barista, roaster or whatever.

Honestly, because that is very important to how we want to help people because at GFB, obviously our mission is to support, uplift, and defend the hourly coffee worker. And so, we decided to create, with the basis of those surveys, create a broad, very detailed, very data heavy way so that baristas and other hourly coffee workers can know what they're getting, what other folks are getting paid around the country, to know if they're getting paid less than other folks.

Also so that we can have a roadmap on, “Okay, here's where we can help people and here's how we can help people out a little better.”

Ashley: Yeah. I should mention too, so the barista spreadsheets that you were talking about, pre-pandemic—which you're right, I think we're all measuring time like this now—so these were these anonymous Excel spreadsheets that were going all around the country, and people could report how much money they were making anonymously.

And it seemed like one of the biggest takeaways is that there was no rhyme or reason to how people were getting paid.

Adam: Right, yeah. I think that we saw that and we remembered that, and we wanted to incorporate that as soon as possible. We, and a lot of this was Valorie, honestly—she created these questions and kind of figured out the best way to see all this information and get this information off to people so that, like I said, we can give people data that they can use to fight for raises and pay increases, and also give us data so that we can help baristas and other hourly coffee workers on a broader basis.

Ashley: Why do you think wage transparency has become something that more people are talking about? Because, pre-pandemic, we did see all of these wage spreadsheets going around and it seems like people are a lot more comfortable talking about salary and wage transparency, but maybe that wasn't the case five years ago or so.

When did you folks start seeing this becoming more and more of a thing, and why do you think it's become more important now?

Valorie: I think in the last couple of years, along with a lot of other conversations that were happening during Covid, it just became easier to talk about this and have these conversations. I remember being told not to talk about my salary, by both my parents and by bosses.

I'm glad that that's changed because, as you said, in 2019, we were seeing a lot of people are being paid really arbitrary amounts and it's not based on position or experience. It's based on favoritism a lot of times or just whim. I think having that conversation now is so important because it's kind of a move towards standardization in the industry and toward fairness in the industry.

Towards a better…

Ashley: A better feature maybe?

Valorie: I think so. I think a more equitable future for baristas and other hourly workers.

Ashley: How'd you folks think about designing the questions for the survey? Adam, you mentioned that Valorie kind of came up with some of the main metrics that you folks were looking at. So how did you sit down and say, “These are the questions that we want to ask. This is the information that we want to find out?”

Valorie: We talked about it in a few board meetings. Actually, Tommy Gallagher deserves a lot of the credit too because he and I sat down for like two hours and we looked over previous questionnaires from—or like the anonymous Excel spreadsheets from 2019—and we decided what we wanted to ask, what we were trying to measure, what our goals were and how we were going to present this.

And he was actually the one who decided that we should also be surveying salaried workers so that hourly workers could see not only what is possible, but also see how salaried workers got to their position.

Ashley: Speaking of salaried workers and incorporating the data of salaried workers versus hourly workers, let's talk about some of the findings, because one of the biggest findings is that salaried workers have a lot more protections across the board than hourly workers.

Adam, I was wondering if you could break down a little bit what the difference between salary and hourly workers was when you looked at the data?

Adam: One of the biggest ones that I see is that 6% of the salaried workers said they didn't receive any additional benefits from their employers, and 38% of hourly workers didn't receive any benefits. So 6% of salaried workers not receiving benefits, it's still not great because if they're salaried, they should get benefits, at the very least to me.

That was one of the things that jumped out to us. And we also noticed that hourly workers weren't receiving raises at the same rates as salaried workers. So if you're salaried, you had a better chance of getting a raise and also you had a better chance of knowing when that raise was coming.

Those were really two of the bigger ones from a pay standpoint. And then with respect to taking home money and how that affected the household: 20% of salaried workers felt like they weren't able to pay their bills comfortably every month; 49% of hourly coffee workers felt like they weren't able to do that. There was a wide—like you are way, way, way better off if you're salaried versus if you were an hourly worker.

Valorie: And to piggyback on what Adam was saying about raises, one of the things we noticed also was hourly employees sometimes aren't getting raises at all. And when they do get raises, it takes longer for them to get their first raise, whereas salaried employees sometimes are receiving a raise within the first three months.

They're also more likely to have clear performance review schedules, clear wage increases—sometimes they get cost of living adjustments every year. And so the gap is also widening. Salaried workers—they're outpacing earning in a way hourly workers just can't keep up with.

And that has huge impacts on what they can do with their lives.

Ashley: Another thing that I found really interesting—so all of this data is readily available. You made this available for anybody to access, and you also included all these really interesting charts and one of the charts that I found was super interesting was that two-thirds of people reported no clear guidelines on wage increases.

So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that finding.

Adam: Yeah, and I think that actually kind of goes to the conversation we had before about salaries. You're way more likely to have that conversation with somebody who's salaried about what the wage increases are, what the schedule is, whether it's like a performance review every six months and a wage increase every year or whatever—you're way more likely to have that conversation with somebody that is salary than an hourly employee for whatever reason.

Because again, we think about wages and how people are paid in a very weird way in this country, and especially within the restaurant/hospitality industry, which being a coffee worker is a part of.

So I think that has a lot to do with it. A lot of owners and managers see hourly workers as temporary and then treat them that way, and then they become temporary because they were treated like they were temporary because they were originally seen as temporary. So it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Valorie: It's a negative feedback cycle, which—going back to our idea of budgeting earlier or budgeting your labor costs—seemed surprising to me that you would treat workers in a way where they would want to leave, or at least you [want to] prevent them leaving because the most expensive part of having employees is hiring and training them.

The cheapest time you're ever gonna have an employee is six months into their job. And so I don't understand why you would create an environment where people leave constantly and you have constant turnover. It's a way of approaching employment that confuses me.

Adam: Yeah, and just to piggyback off Valorie: it's cheaper to give somebody—let's say an hourly coffee worker—it's cheaper to give them a dollar raise. Because a dollar raise is gonna cost you, as a business, a little over a thousand dollars over the course of a year, versus hiring and training a brand new person, which can cost like, $4,000 to hire and train and get somebody new—and that also depends upon how senior that person is.

So like, if you're quibbling with a coffee worker, a lead barista or whoever, over getting paid $16 an hour versus $17 an hour, and in the end they leave to, to spool back up, hire that person, fill those shifts, all of these things…And then not to mention the opportunity cost of whoever is training and hiring those people doing that instead of anything else. That's never made sense to me—the way that we treat hourly workers in this country as if they're temporary.

And then we wonder—or not we, but owners wonder—why the labor costs are so high is because you have such a high turnover.

Ashley: Right. And then we're living in this era in the United States specifically, where people are quibbling about like, “Oh, no one wants to work anymore.”

It's like, “Well, we as a country have treated people as hourly, temporary, not gonna stay for a long time.” So why are we suddenly surprised when people don't wanna fill specific roles that they've been treated at like garbage at?

Adam: Can I talk about that real quick?

Ashley: Go for it.

Adam: That actually bothers me on a lot of levels, but I have a lot of friends that aren't in coffee, that work desk jobs that, throughout the pandemic they were able to do from home and now they're going back into work. So they're also really frustrated about their jobs.

We're also frustrated on this end because we've been told for so long that like, “Oh, you just work in coffee,” or, “you’re just at a restaurant, you're just a bartender or whatever—when are you gonna get a real job or something?”

I heard this a lot when I was an hourly coffee worker, and then when the pandemic happened, we're suddenly essential. And so to then [hear], “Oh, nobody wants to work,” it's like, for two and a half years, we are these essential people—still getting paid like crap and getting treated worse and worse on a daily basis.

And now, of course I don't wanna work that job anymore. Of course I wanna get out of coffee and go into coding or into nursing or design or music or follow my passions because I've learned that no matter how much you say, “This job is important, this job is essential, we need this job in order for the country to run effectively,” I'm still gonna get paid like crap.

I'm still gonna get treated like crap. So what's the net benefit in me staying here? No, I don't wanna work this job. That's why nobody wants to work these jobs is because we've been told all the time that it was just a dead end job. Why are we doing it then?

Then we're told for two years, it's essential to the lifeblood of this country that you work this job. And then we're told again, "Oh, it's a dead end job. Why are you doing it? And I'm gonna treat you like crap.” On top of that? Yeah, I'm leaving. I'm not gonna work there anymore.

Ashley: Right. And then we have this built-in system of, “Okay, we hire you for this job, but we're gonna treat you like you're temporary. We're gonna treat you like you're not gonna be here for a long time.”

And as you both mentioned, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. It just perpetuates this idea that certain jobs are temporary so people stay in them for very short amounts of time because they're not getting their needs met and it just becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But we can stop this. And I think one of the secondary findings I'm imagining that you folks have found doing this, is that like planning kind of matters a lot. So thinking back to the salary versus hourly debate, it seems like having a plan for somebody, be it, “This is when you're gonna get your six month raise,” or “This is when you're gonna get your PTO benefits,” has a substantial benefit to workers.

Valorie: Yeah, I agree, because I think that shows a level of thoughtfulness and care and investment in your employee—that your employee is already giving to you.

I think having a plan for their career, at least an idea of what their career could be at your company, shows that you are just as invested as they are and that you care just as much as they do.

That can often be enough to keep someone for at least six months longer than they might've stayed in a job that feels quote unquote dead end.

Ashley: Right, right. Having all of these folks, especially in the hourly tab—you have the salary tab, you have the hourly tab—it just seems like there's no plan at all.

And I think this happens a lot in coffee shops, where people open up coffee shops and they don't see their jobs as employing people. Like they don't see it.

They're like, “Oh, I'm gonna hire people because they're gonna work at this coffee shop. But my job isn't to actually foster any sort of development for people. I'm just gonna throw out numbers willy-nilly without a plan.” Which is again, something I see so much at so many coffee shops.

But it seems like just sitting down and taking a couple of days and being like, “This is how this coffee shop is gonna run. I'm going to start everybody at this rate. I'm going to give them these incentives if they have zero to two years of experience versus three to five versus this…” like, make a rubric for yourself!

Check the boxes and make it automatic and that'll save you not only so much headache because you have this all planned out—so you know when you hire someone, you can say, “Okay, this person has this experience. I'm gonna start them at this amount based on this rubric I started,” but also that barista or that hourly worker can say, “I understand why I'm getting this rate, and I know what comes next.”

Valorie: I also think that one of the findings of the survey was that a lot of salaried workers that responded actually started out as baristas. That's where their careers began. People do start as baristas and move into becoming directors of operations—that happens and we have evidence of that.

And I would bet—I mean, we couldn't really measure this specifically with the survey—but I would bet that the people that were baristas and moved up also had bosses somewhere along the way who helped them make a plan and help them figure out what the future could look like and took that time to invest in them.

Ashley: I wanna talk about some of the really big findings.

On average, hourly workers were making $14 an hour based on your findings, which I think if someone read that in a vacuum without any sort of understanding of the context of where we are in the United States today, and also how much people are actually working, they would be like, “Oh wow, $14 an hour. The minimum wage in the United States is $7.25. That's almost double. That's great.”

But I looked up some living wages in kind of mid-level cities, like not the biggest cities in the United States, but some average ones. I live in Madison, Wisconsin. Madison is the 81st largest city in the United States. The cost of living here for one person with no children by themselves is $17.49 an hour. Cincinnati is the 66th biggest city in the United States—the living wage there is $15.34 an hour. In Oklahoma City, it's about $15 an hour—that's the 22nd biggest city in the United States.

What was it like putting all of those numbers together, putting all those salary numbers together and being like, “Oh, wow, $14 an hour is really not a lot.”

Adam: Well, on top of that, it isn't just $14 an hour—that's assuming that you're working 40 hours a week. On average, baristas are only working 26, or scheduled 26 hours a week. So even if you push that to 30, that's like $1,500 a month—you're nowhere close to that $15.71 for 40 hours or whichever.

You're only working a little more than half of those hours to get to 40. So you’re extremely underpaid and almost have to get a second job in order to make ends meet at $14 an hour. You're right, in the vacuum, $14 an hour seems like a lot, and then even if you compare it to, “Oh yeah, like it's only a dollar less than $15.71. And maybe you’re getting a dollar or two more an hour.” But still, that's only 26 hours a week. So there's still that huge gap that needs to be made up, and so that becomes an issue in and of itself.

Valorie: Right. The MIT Living Wage Calculator is calculated using a 40 hour work week. And so they're saying that you need $15.71 per hour, 40 hours a week to be able to live in Madison. And even if you're making $14 an hour plus tips, which the survey showed the average barista is only making like $100 to $300 a week in tips, which is maybe an extra like $3, $4 an hour if they're working 26 hours a week, so that takes them to maybe $18 an hour.

But still only 26 hours a week. That's not the same. There's still a very large gap between what baristas are making and what the living wage is in almost every city.

Ashley: Yeah, that's a big important finding, too. I'm glad that you brought that up, Adam, that baristas are only working about 26 hours a week. So it seems like—and I was looking through some of the comments people were allowed to leave, like “Anything else you wanna know or share with us?” at the end of the survey.

And a lot of people said that they could not live if they didn't have a spouse that made more money or that they had a second or third jobs.

Valorie: Mm-hmm.

Ashley: What was that reading these comment?

Valorie: Disheartening, honestly, I think it's just so hard—I've lived that life, right? Up until the pandemic I was living that life. And even briefly during and after the pandemic, I was kind of living that desperate kind of clawing feeling of needing two and three jobs just to make ends meet.

And it was so frustrating too because I think a lot of the logic for not investing in hourly workers in terms of their growth, a lot of that comes in with this idea that the job is unskilled and that in order to move up in the world, quote unquote, you need to have degrees and experience hourly workers can't afford to get anymore.

Like I remember being a barista and wanting to go back to school to take one class a semester at UCLA, and I wasn't allowed to shift my schedule so that I could do that. And in any case, even if I had been allowed to, I wouldn't have been able to afford the tuition for one class a semester.

So there's kind of this feeling of entrapment. Baristas can't afford to make their lives, they can't afford to change their lives in any kind of meaningful, dramatic way. And they're also being treated as if it's their fault that they're not doing so.

Ashley: I wanna zoom outward a little bit because I think everything you just said about education and trying to better your opportunities is really, really important. And I wonder as we—because to me, I can say like, “Oh, you know, I used to make whatever amount when I first started as a barista and I made a little bit more towards the end of my ten years as a barista.”

But I would argue that the $10 an hour I made in 2010 was significantly more worthwhile than the $14 an hour I made in 2018. It feels like we're trending downward. And I wonder for you folks, is that a conversation that you're having? What will happen in five years to baristas or hourly coffee workers in general?

Adam: Yeah, that's something we think about a lot. The thing that a lot of us know and kind of talk about, but you don't really think about in real numbers, is inflation. Inflation went up 7.1% last year, and I think it went up between 4% and 5% the year before. So like $15, $14 last year is not $14 this year. You would need it to raise 7.1% in order just to keep barely making ends meet. You're losing money actively that way. So there's that part of it.

And then a lot of folks are scared of a recession right now, and are cutting back hours—you're seeing it everywhere from tech to restaurants—and people are spending less and going out less. People are in preparation for a recession that we don't know it's gonna happen yet for sure, and then people are making less money that way.

It's something that I know I think about a lot. I know Valorie thinks about a lot, and I know that the board, we all think about collectively, and that’s why we try to figure out the possible ways to get help to hourly coffee workers in a lot of different ways.

Ashley: I have to imagine, when you look at the data that you've compiled, you must be begging owners to look at this and be like, “Please, internalize this and think about what this means.” Because when I look at this data and I think about the trend downwards, including all of the conversations about inflation, about needing a 7.1% raise just to subsist, just to be making the same amount you were last year.

I wonder, if we're talking about coffee in five or 10 years, we're gonna lose baristas. We're just not gonna have them.

Valorie: Yeah, that's something that occurred to me looking at this. I was like, “If these wage trends don't change, I don't know how anybody continues on in this career.” And I think that there are some people who are planning for that and who are thinking, “Oh, we're gonna move toward robotics, or AI or something.”

And I'm like, “I don't think we're gonna have the technology to do that in five years.” We need to come up with a different solution than having robots make my coffee.

Ashley: Right. That seems like a pretty poor solution for like, “I don't wanna pay people more money.” Especially too—I don’t know how many conversations you're having with business owners or maybe if you've met people with resistance points, but I find when I talk to people who own businesses, the resistance points I hear people talking about are not wanting to upset consumers.

And I'm like, “Why don't you raise your prices? Why don't you talk to your customers more directly about what you need from them?” And I find that a lot of owners don't take that step.

Adam: Yeah, and don't get me wrong, I think not wanting to upset consumers can seem like a valid point, but I think your customers will be a lot more upset when your coffee shop doesn't exist because nobody can afford to work there anymore.

Valorie: Yeah, people are gonna be more upset when you close because you couldn't make enough money to pay your workers and pay your rent.

Ashley: Or people are gonna be upset that they go into their favorite coffee shop and they don't recognize anybody every month, two months.

Adam: I think that's the big thing about automatic, like robotic coffee. I think that that's the one thing that if there are companies that are looking forward to that or like looking to that as a solution, people don't necessarily go to get specialty coffee because they love the coffee—it's the entire experience. You know?

It's the same reason you wouldn't love a robotic waiter at a white-linen restaurant. You want somebody who knows your order, who talks to you, who knows who your kids are and knows that your kid just had a bad spelling test and loves chocolate croissants and gave you extra chocolate croissants so that your kid feels better.

The little things like that, that may go into your coffee shop really special. And for sure, if you're at a super high volume shop downtown in a business area where there's a lot of people [automation] may be helpful, but again, back to the pandemic because everything post-pandemic stems from there, if you have more people working remotely and working even four days in, one day out of the office, there's gonna be less of those super busy downtown coffee shops where the more semi-automatic machines make more sense.

You have to take care of your people first, and that's something that we know in the coffee industry very intimately. We talk about how we need to pay producers better on that end of the supply chain, and like the reason why GFB exists and has continued to exist is because we also know we need to take care of the baristas and other hourly coffee workers on this side of the supply chain.

Again, I do understand like a lot of those pain points that shop owners have, but look, taking a long view of it, what's more important? Keeping your shop open in the long run and upsetting a few customers now, or upsetting everybody when your shop closes?

Valorie: My thought whenever I talk to people that are worried about upsetting their customers, even outside of coffee, I'm like, “Well, those people aren't your people. They're not the people that you want in there anyway, because they're also probably not treating your employees very well. And is that really how you want your employees to experience their job every day, with crappy customers that are rude to them?”

And I think being clear about your goals as an employer and how you wanna treat your employees well—that attracts customers. People come in and, yeah, you might see some changeover in your customer base, but I think done right, and explained well, then you're not going to lose the customers that matter.

Ashley: Right. And I think something you said made me think—it's really about having a vision for your coffee shop, and it's about saying, “These are the values that I have and this is how I'm gonna honor them. It's wild to me how often the goal is expansion and it's like, “But why? To what end?”

Why are you doing this? And I think that a lot of people really can't answer that question: why are you doing this? Why is this here? Does it need to be here?

It's okay if it doesn't. Maybe it doesn't need to be here. But knowing your answer and being able to execute on that is such a—it’s so interesting to me how many people can't answer that question. And if you're looking at this wage data and you're just kinda resistant to it for some reason, if it's making you uncomfortable or you're just like, “I don't have the means to do this,” I hope you leave this conversation asking yourself like, “Why? Why am I doing what I'm doing?”

Valorie: Yeah. Who said that this is the way you have to do it, because you could just not—you can just not.

Ashley: You could just not!

We've talked a lot about big important things that maybe have a negative side to them. Is there anything that was really positive or encouraging from this wage survey that warmed your heart or any of the comments that you read that made you think, “Okay, we have a lot of work to do, but there's some good happening here.”

Valorie: Two things that immediately come to my mind. I don't know about you, Adam, but the first one was that a lot of hourly workers get PTO and sick days, and I know that some of that is state-mandated. But it was very encouraging to see that, just because—I remember being a barista and being told that breaks weren't required.

So the idea that we've come so far in like the 8 to 10 years since a boss told me that—that’s very encouraging. And then the other thing that I found really encouraging, was that of the, I think it was like 79 or 80 salaried respondents, 59 of them started their careers behind the bar as a barista.

I'm like, “Oh, that's great because that means that somewhere in this industry we are prizing growth and development and people are managing to get their foot in the door and then move up.” And that's really exciting and encouraging to see.

Adam: Those are my two, actually.

Valorie: Sorry! Sorry I told them.

Adam: No, it's fine. Because getting PTO and being able to have a career path I think is important and I think, at the bare minimum, what folks want out of the job is that they can get sick, and they can take time off and like, go visit their family or take a trip or whatever—they have a path. And if they want to be a barista for the rest of their life or they wanna be a production assistant for the rest of their life, they can, and that's completely fine.

But if they wanna be director of operations, or head roaster, or a trainer, that there is a path and that they can move upwards. I think that those are things that almost every employee kind of holds dear: just the ability to have an option. So yeah, Valorie stole them, but I think that those are really it.

Valorie: Yeah. The option to grow is great.

Ashley: Is there anything you folks are working on now that you want people to know about?

Valorie: (pause) I'm freezing because there's so many things that we're doing right now!

Adam: Yeah. We're planning a lot of cool stuff for [SCA] Expo.

I think, depending upon when this comes out, some of the stuff that we're in the middle of may be signed up for, whatever, or may be over. We're planning a lot of cool stuff for Expo.

We wanna celebrate our birthday in some way: our birthday is March 17th and we don't know how we're gonna do that yet. But I would just say keep your eye out for GFB stuff around Expo because we're super excited about Expo for the first time in our existence, about what we can do at Expo.

We're still giving out monthly grants to people. Emergency grants, not as many as before, because we were doing about 28 at a time or 10 at a time each quarter. And now we're hitting that number, but we're doing them monthly, so there's less there, so it's a little different.

We're just really excited to keep doing the work and keep helping folks in supporting, uplifting, and defending hourly coffee workers however we can.

Valorie: I would also say that like if this wage survey, if this tickled your fancy, if you were like, “Oh crap, I didn't fill this out.” We are gonna run this again. It’s gonna be an annual thing that we do every year.

We're also planning to use the data from this survey to create a map where people can refer to see what the average pay in an area is and how that compares to the MIT Living Wage data. So look out for that. We're hoping to get that out soon.

Ashley: And if you're listening, please look at the MIT Living Wage data for where you live. Just find it.

Valorie: it's important.

Adam: Also, people forget sometimes that like we are an 501(c)(3) nonprofit and if you do believe in the work that we're doing and you do want to help support, uplift, and defend hourly coffee workers, please donate to us because legitimately every $1, $2, $5 monthly donation really helps us and helps us to be able to plan our budget and what we can do on a annual, semi-annual basis.

If you wanna support the work that we're doing please, please share what we're doing. It's easiest to do it through our website, which is Gofundbean.org.

Ashley: Thank you both for taking time to chat with me. I really appreciate it.

0 Comments
BOSS BARISTA
BOSS BARISTA
A newsletter and podcast about a thing you drink everyday. Interviews and articles about big ideas in coffee, the service industry, and collective action.