What Does Success in Coffee Look Like?
What Does Success in Coffee Look Like?
Elle Taylor on Amethyst Coffee's tip-elimination experiment, its impact, and what happened next.
What does success as a coffee company look like? Growth in revenue and locations? Being acquired? Or is it about making a difference, both for your community and your employees?
On the flipside, what counts as failure? Is choosing to close down on your own terms, having had a real impact, really so bad?
In May 2020, as coffee shops across the country began to reopen after the sort-of lockdowns that followed Covid’s arrival in the United States, Amethyst Coffee Company made an announcement: the Denver-based business was eliminating tips and raising its prices by 50% across the board, in an effort to pay its staff a proper living wage.
Lattes, previously $4.50, became $6.75; mochas went from $5.50 to $7.50. This increase would let the company pay its baristas $50,000 per year, according to a somewhat breathless CNN article about the move that was published in August of 2020.
And Then the Pandemic Happened
Eliminating tips had always been the goal, according to founder and co-owner Elle Taylor, but the time had never felt right to make the move. “We had really wanted to open Amethyst in 2015 without tips,” she told me, “but I was kind of scared—what if no one comes here? What if the prices are too scary for people?”
After discussions among the staff, there was a split between those who wanted to work for tips and those, like Taylor, who didn’t. And Taylor felt that it was unfair for her to force that decision onto her staff who spent more time behind the bar and would have to bear the brunt of any bad reactions. “We just couldn't really ever come to the conclusion that it was the right time to take away tips,” she said. “And then the pandemic happened.”
With Covid surging and front line service workers in the public eye like never before, the spring of 2020 seemed like the ideal time to try out what is still quite a radical idea. “We really just tried to seize the moment,” Taylor explained, “and we had been talking about this for years so we were really prepared.”
With both Taylor and business partner Breezy Sanchez working more as baristas, they felt like they could handle the possible negative reactions from customers. And the response was largely positive, Taylor said. “I think people were at a point where they were very aware of the struggles of working class people to make ends meet.” (As Taylor pointed out, $50,000 isn’t even quite enough for those living in a city like Denver.)
Reading about the move (and writing about it for the Coffee News Roundup), I remember being impressed. In fact I wrote, “This whole thing seems like a no-brainer. Pay people more, they’re happier and more secure, they work harder, they give better service, your customers are happier. The price increase (that the company says is roughly 20-30% once tipping is accounted for) is really not that much.”
But was it sustainable? Would customers continue supporting Amethyst as the pandemic wore on and people’s perceptions of service industry workers shifted back towards the baseline?
What I found when I first spoke with Taylor at the end of August was that it was sustainable, but the toll of the pandemic meant the willingness to stay open was no longer there. “We’ve been able to keep it going,” Taylor said. “We have closed two shops since then, but it’s not really related to the tips—we're also just kind of on our way out.”
A Halloween End
At the end of October, Amethyst made the announcement: they would close on the 31st. It had been coming for a while: a Denver Post article from 2021 opened with the line, “Elle Taylor and Breezy Sanchez are burned out.” Even when they raised prices in 2020, the owners were thinking about selling.
“There's a lot of shiny ideas about owning your own cafe and being the person that makes the choices,” Taylor told me. “And some of them are really true, some of them are shiny and fun and beautiful and really fulfilling. But a lot of them are really terrible and sad.”
Being responsible for the livelihoods of 17 people pre-pandemic, and six after reopening, took its toll. Issues with landlords didn’t help, in a city (and a country) with skyrocketing commercial rents. Amethyst went from four cafes and a roastery in 2019 to just the original this year, and was finally able to find someone to take over the lease.
It’s a quiet, somewhat sad end to what was a very real example of what can happen if a company values its employees and the community it’s in. It’s an experiment that Taylor looks back on with pride—and some ambivalence.
A Different System
“Coffee shops are meant to be this space for people to feel safe and seen and loved, and be part of a community,” she says when we speak again in early November. “I think that we did that really well, and in that regard Amethyst was a very big success. And from a coffee industry standpoint we also did a lot of good and we did a lot of pushing socially, and our people really cared about coffee. So again, from that standpoint, Amethyst was very successful. It did what it set out to do, you know?”
“From the more political lens of, did we materially effect change? That one is a little trickier,” she continues. “On the one hand, I do think we really pushed both the coffee community and the community that we serve to think differently about how workers are treated and what it means to have real solidarity with the people you work with. But also at the end of the day, I think it really revealed that even at a place like Amethyst, we often came up short.”
We discuss the recent launch of a coffee membership by Go Get Em Tiger, and the need for more experimentation in the coffee industry. “There’s this idea where if somebody tries an experiment like that, and then they stop doing it, it’s like, ‘Oh, well, it failed, and it was bad,’” Taylor says. “But we had to try something, and now we're assessing how it worked and how it didn't and we're gonna try something else. There's this idea somehow that it has to be perfect, or if you're changing or moving around, that you're failing. Which is just not the case.”
Taylor and Sanchez definitely tried, pushing Amethyst in a new direction and willing their community to come along. It may always have been doomed, the way the industry—and country—is currently structured, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth trying.
As Taylor sums it up, “I think a big conclusion of Amethyst is that, if we really want to see a different world moving forward, we need a different system.”