Pros
Great coffee, great employees. The baristas are some of the best people you’ll meet
Cons
Management. This is one of those places that from the outside looks amazing to work at. Local company, artisan coffee — but when you pull back the curtains you really start to see what a train wreck it is. I worked at one of the smaller branch locations, not the main one downtown so I can’t speak to that. But this company proved time and again that they don’t care about their employees. Despite being a “local” company, they are owned by a larger corporate entity. They will pay you as little as possible, so you become heavily reliant on tips. Only problem with that is the product is so expensive for customers, adding a tip on top of it is frustrating for customers and many will skip it. On a really busy day, you’ll make good money. Otherwise it’s minimum wage. Just as an example — when you’re hired you’re told there are yearly raises based on merit, and your eligibility is determined by employee reviews. Despite all of us working hard and going above and beyond whenever possible, and most of us having glowing employee reviews — when that time came for merit raises, we were told we would not be getting merit raises because “Kansas city raised the minimum wage, so that was your raise”. This really felt like a slap in the face from the company. Kansas City raising the minimum wage was a change in the company’s legal obligation to pay us. Raises on the other hand, are earned. We all earned raises based on the criteria laid out for us when we were hired, and we were all denied. Management was then shocked to see that employees stopped going above and beyond or doing duties outside our job description. During my tenure, employee turnover was incredibly high — the highest of any place I had ever worked. This is due to a multitude of reasons but chief among them being the borderline incompetence of management. I think the main problem we encountered is management seemed to do the least amount of work. Anytime they were scheduled on shift, it wasn’t to actually be on shift, they’d just be in the back doing “admin” work, no matter how busy it was. In a year of working there, I only saw upper management two or three times, so it feels like there is a big disconnect between management and employees. And they don’t seem to realize how miserable everyone is and do little to alleviate that. They talked down to us consistently, would implement policies that felt belittling (for example, if the cash drawer was short, you are responsible for repaying it out of pocket), and task lists for literally every minor task like “wipe this fridge door, wipe this cabinet, wipe this counter then this counter”. Things that we would all do regardless, but now we have to initial 100 separate tasks every shift. I feel that if management can’t trust their employees to do the most basic and menial of tasks, they should take a step back and look at their management style to assess why that might be the case. On top of all that, they would always disregard employee feedback on how to make certain processes more efficient or better in any way. So in summary, working here was a real let down. Just about Everyone who left in my time there left on bad terms, and I think that says a lot about management and how the company operates.
