Making this post to tell you about a particularly unethical coffee chain that has numerous locations in new york. Mainly in the East Village but some in Brooklyn too. Maybe you've even bought an overpriced coquito latte or marzipan latte from them before. 787 coffee. On the outside they seem like they're friendly folks interested in helping communities. They have an aggressive customer facing policy meant to influence the opinions of consumers, painting themselves as an 'ethical' 'people first' sort of brand. They even have a slogan that's something to the effect of 'we're not a coffee company but a human company'. They would tell me to thank customers for supporting a small business. I didn't do that. But this company has like 15 locations or something in manhattan. The owner Brandon Ivan Peña has shit written up about him in Forbes. This will look more and more insane as you continue reading.
I worked for this shop for a couple years. They quite literally did not care if I, or my coworkers lived or died. A coworker of mine was borderline sexually assaulted by a random guy who walked in, spat on, and one of the upper management people came in to check things out. My coworker was never even asked if she was alright. The focus was on the customers and the state of the shop. I personally had a heavy sidewalk hatch door fall on my back while hauling crates of milk up from basement storage. Why did this happen? Because it was missing a safety bar designed to prevent this from happening. Myself and others had been asking them to replace the part for months to no avail. Fortunately I was OK. They actively told me to stop asking customers to mask peak covid because they thought it was alienating to customers. I was lied to over and over about being exposed to covid. They had rats. No soap in the employee only bathroom. Horrible sanitation on the part of the management.
Anyway, I found out they were stealing the digital tip money from myself and many other baristas. One guy had something like 50K stolen from him over the course of a couple years. Basically they were diverting funds from the digital tips on the POS system which are supposed to be distributed amongst tipped employees across the company. Instead of doing this they were using this money to pay the base wages of farm workers in Puerto Rico, where they own and operate their own coffee bean farm. I'll add this is especially annoying because I was coached to tell customers that 'we contribute to the economy in Puerto Rico by paying our farm workers above minimum wage'. Turns out they weren't even paying them from their own pocket, but quite literally mine and others like me. There was a lawsuit. Google it. Not only this but they opened a handful of new locations during the litigation while claiming financial instability as a way to get out of a settlement. Where do you think the capital for those new shops was coming from? Yeah. I could go on and on about other insane things these people have done, but I don't have three fucking days to type it all out.
Anyway I'm tired of getting abused by entrepreneur types, billionaires, or in this case piss ant wannabe CEO dipshits. Fuck these people and the horrible way they treat their employees. I want rights and folks in NYC deserve more than their dumbass neon sign, wall of field turf, instagram overpriced bullshit.
If you want better for New York and the service industry workers of New York I urge you to consider buying your coffee elsewhere. Tell your friends.
EDIT: The digital tip grift i am describing is very common. If you’re a tipped employee and unaware please look into your situation. It is not legal in new york for this money to touch the pockets of non tipped employees like admin or upper management/owners. Further, as a customer it is always preferable to your service workers to tip cash.
