On Sunday, it was the final chance for residents in Minnesota to get their favored $8 coffee to go along with a $16 bacon-egg-cheese breakfast sandwich. Café Cerés is (was) a local chain of upper-end coffee shops in the metroplex that was favored by the locals, but April 13 saw the chain closing its doors. The business was brought to an end not by a rough economy but by its workers. 

Last fall, the employees at the four locations voted to unionize. What you will see on display is a common theme found in the latest generation of workers, where the staff displays an overinflated sense of value and power. Forgetting they are low-skilled workers in the service industry, you see on display the fractured mindset of those who elevate their position from coffee hustlers to being regarded as “baristas.” You can dress up the title with any preferred Euro-euphemism all you like, it doesn’t change your role as a caffeine facilitator.

It is something we have become accustomed to over the years, emerging from the union-fed activism of $15-MW movement. This fast food burger flippers demand for high minimum wage salaries altered staffing sizes inside franchises and inspired the kiosk automation ordering methods becoming more common today. The sense that owners have no choice but to cave to these extortion methods frequently exposes the ignorance behind these emotional strong-arm attempts.

The Café Cerés saga displays many of the contemporary pitfalls of these organizing efforts. It used to be that unions were about job protections, better wages, and securing benefits. Nowadays that sounds more like the ground floor demands in negotiations. Frequently we hear of head-shaking demands of being included in the operational aspects of the business from those in entry-level positions. It is expected that the owners who invested at high risk and put in sweat equity for years have to heed the demands of 20-year-old Cody the barista between his time spent writing a screenplay.

The Café Cerés workers wanted things like more concrete scheduling, something that works against a business during lull times. But more than that you see examples of the attempt at enforcing leverage that does not exist. The staff organized with Unite Here Local 17, and the shop plied workers with the pitch to lobby for full-time hours, career paths, and to demand a say in the decision-making of the business. This saw the excitable staffers endure about six months of negotiations with no headway made, and culminating in the lowest of wages – $0.00 per zero hours.

While they pushed these union platforms beyond the usual, the front of house workers at Cerés were earning, with tips, roughly $25-30 hourly, and health insurance that covered 80 percent of their premiums. But this was unacceptable. They also were commanding to be involved in the operations, with demands that defied common business practices.

They also increasingly want a role in managing the business. That means input on decisions like where Cerés sources milk (a coffee shop’s largest or second-largest raw material expense) and whether pro-Palestine pins can be worn at work.

Imagine operating a restaurant with notoriously thin margins, and your scone-slingers start requiring you to source your dairy from organically approved ranches, and the eggs had to derive from free range hand-picked boutique farms – all while repelling a segment of your customer base with political insignia during breakfast. Your biscuit sandwiches will start to be competitively priced with a grade-A 24oz. Porterhouse, and profits will evaporate faster than the vape clouds seen behind the shop during break times.

These self-absorbed unionizers never look ahead at the effects they are provoking. When facing lowered-to-zero profits, while the staff is becoming increasingly belligerent and activist in nature, closing is the viable option at that stage; saving money and silencing the bleating is the preferred option, every time. And the whining from the liberated workforce never carries with it introspection.

This is what's commonly referred to as the "find out" phase.
⬇️ pic.twitter.com/kWIv4mKQRh

— CrimeWatchMpls (@CrimeWatchMpls) April 12, 2025

There is some contradictory obliviousness in the tear-shedding following the closures. The Unite Here representatives claimed their list of demands would not only deliver better working conditions but higher profits, and yet they fall back on the accusation that the decision to close was borne out of a level of corporate greed intent to bust the union. If the ownership were truly these rapacious capitalists, do you not think they would have embraced the chance to add to their coffers?

This is not a consideration for the labor force that exists in a world of pure theorizing absent legitimate business acumen. Explain why you would propose a business plan to increase profits and the owner would instead opt to lock the doors. If these people are in fact the free market geniuses they position themselves to be, then how is it they have not undertaken the process of creating a business built on their proposals? 

Put up the cash and run your own activist breakfast nook serving gourmet ingredients from socially accepted sources, and rake in the profits. But they know this is not a viable business model. We see this in the way their methods are attempted. They never invest in their own platform; rather, they impose it on those already successful.

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