Shift Notes: Barista Work
A shift lead writes in on bad design, difficult customers, and the rest of the job.
The modern workday runs on caffeine (and prescription stimulants, if we’re being honest). Coffee sets the blood in motion, as Balzac put it. But what of the legions of workers serving up the coffee? Barista work is one of those jobs that looks effortless from the customer side: the drink appears, the name gets called, and the whole thing seems calm and orderly. But during the rush hours, the reality is closer to Orwell’s description of kitchens: everyone is “doing two men’s work.” with an elegant surface hiding the chaos underneath.
I worked at a coffee shop in Cambridge/Somerville long ago and while I suspect I’ve never been better at any job than I was at being behind the bar there, it made me bitter at times, try as I might to not hold grudges. We served a lot of faculty from the nearby universities, and while plenty of them were perfectly nice, some treated me like a moron. I remember one asking if I knew how to make change as I gathered his to hand to him. One day your school will be asking me to speak there dumbass, I thought. (This proved correct.)
This week’s Shift Notes is a barista (and union organizer, though they prefer anonymity) on what the job looks like from behind the bar.
I’m a shift lead at a large coffee chain, but of what I do all day is not making coffee. I clean bathrooms, do dishes, make sure my coworkers take their breaks, deal with difficult customers, restock shelves, take out trashes, and more.
The work could be divided up more deliberately, but also the turnover is so high that it mostly ends up being that the people who have been around the longest do the tasks which keep the café running (like counting the cash, doing inventory, staying on top of deep cleaning) and the newbies do the more glamorous work (serving customers drinks). I like training my coworkers. It’s exciting for me when I get to tell them about how coffee is produced or where it grows. It’s also a lot of fun to see them improve over time. Few of my coworkers could taste the differences between coffees or make latte art when they first started and now a lot of them are better than me (at some tasks).
Our café is fairly safe, aside from one poorly placed drain which is situated next to a fridge and is directly underneath the part of the espresso machine where we steam milk. The placement of the drain means that what should be simple and mundane tasks (restocking the fridge or steaming milk) are incredibly hazardous because some dickwad with a hard on for “minimalism” didn’t think about how the space would actually be used when designing the bar. It’s not uncommon for baristas to have their foot fall into the drain while steaming milk or to trip over it when trying to open the fridge. Other elements, like cabinets placed too high for our staff of mostly short women, or harsh bright-white overhead lighting, make the environment really uncomfortable and grating to be in. Our café has a nearly all grey or white color palette, which makes the harsh white lighting even worse to deal with during an 8 hour shift. The space was clearly designed by someone who’s never worked in a café before in their life. Along the bar there’s a pretty scalloped detail, but it messes with the acoustics such that there’s a terrible echo in the café. Combined with the horrendous “minimalist” design elements of a bare concrete floor and wind curtains, it means that the space is an absolute auditory nightmare. Most of the cafés feel like they were designed by someone who didn’t quite have the stomach for designing torture programs, but who also did not want people to have a pleasant experience in their daily life. It feels like it was designed to make both the workers and the customers suffer.
Going to work every day makes me feel like an absurdist hero. Surviving the job is one thing, dealing with customers is another. They shout at us surprisingly often. Some of them are sweet retirees, such as the 60 something woman from Chicago who was nervous to tell me how excited she was about Pope Leo. She said “I didn’t want to offend anyone around,” but the café was nearly empty at the time. Other customers are less sweet, such as the retiree who came in wearing a brown overcoat and a “Lehman Brothers” cap. While some customers like that clearly have sinister backgrounds, they at least understand the social dynamic involved in ordering a coffee. Others do not.
On Valentines Day, a man came in wearing a “Bush/Reagan ‘84” baseball cap. He was too old for it to have been ironic. He mobile ordered two of the most complicated drinks on the menu for him and his (I assume) girlfriend and made me and my coworkers remake the order twice. “I paid $19 for these drinks, they should be good,” he shouted, unsympathetic to the fact that it would take me an hour to make that much money.
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