It’s always a rush to my meetings with George.
The commuter rail is a little unpredictable, and the Wellesley Square platform is long and so narrow I inevitably get stuck behind some of those Slow Walkers, and once I’m off the platform the direct route to the library cuts across uneven knolls of grass and scrub, over which I run, wary of tripping but sometimes not wary enough, only to chance the timing at the crosswalk; and then, inside and a little sweaty, it comes down to the precarious availability of a conference room, which I reserve in the minutes before George trails in behind his mother like a stretched shadow. We wave hello. We go upstairs to learn.
George is a genius, though you wouldn’t know it at first. I say, “George, what are you reading these days?” He says, “Uh— uh— a book— called Gödel, Escher, Bach.” I could not write a more humorous, outlandish, freakishly smart answer. After two weeks, he’s 400 pages in. He also has the rare gift of knowing what he doesn’t know, and he’s capable of a genuine philosophical excitement I haven’t seen like this in anyone (maybe John). We talk about the trolley problem or the allegory of the cave and his affect undergoes a revolution, this opening-up of his face, a specialty grin, he’s completely overtaken by joy.
He’s also in seventh grade, and hardly speaks English. In fact he hardly speaks at all.
George and I have spent the last five or six weeks trying to answer a prompt. He wrote an essay about it. Here it is:
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Is it? Does it?
The quote is originally from Theodore Parker, a Unitarian minister in the 1850s, but it was popularized by Martin Luther King Jr. George has some thoughts. He’s calling bullshit — not just on the notion that “the arc of the moral universe… bends toward justice,” but also on the idea that there is such a thing as “the arc of the moral universe.” More than once, I’ve found myself about to recommend On the Genealogy of Morals to a seventh grader; we have a little Nietzsche on our hands. “Morality is a human invention,” he says — well, writes, sort of, via Google Translate, turning his computer awkwardly toward me. “There can’t be an objective arc of the moral universe, because justice is always subjective, and if we track the subjective arc it immediately becomes contradictory, and anyway humans have only been around for like a millisecond compared with the universe, so the moral arc is more like a little blip.” Wow, George. Right. You doing okay?
But George is more than a baby cynic. He can also really write — just not in English. When I have him write by hand, it’s like his genius brain shuts down, and suddenly, even when his claims remain unexpected and sometimes a little brilliant, he can’t think of reasons they might be true, can’t conjure the metaphors he’s so adept at when he translates, and struggles to put down more than a few sentences without a question to goad him on. What I’ve realized is that my job is less to teach him to write than to help him navigate a new architecture of thinking, a fresh set of symbols and grammars through which to process the world. To a guy like George, that matters; there’s some inertia; he has this mute understanding that there are stakes involved, whatever they might be.
It also means his essay on the arc of the moral universe reads like a collision between two structures of thinking — one that’s fluent and metaphorical and advanced, if a little abstract, and one that’s clunky and unequal to his complex ideas.
To his credit, it’s not an easy prompt. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Tough cookies, as Anna’s grandma would say. (Personally, I think George is a tough cookie.) I can’t answer it either, of course; I just give him a few vectors to follow into the meat of the issue. Do we look at stats and metrics, poverty levels, life expectancy, etc? Do we focus explicitly on the evolution of understandings of the term “justice”? Do we give credence to the notion that, as David Brooks says in one of his ultra-rare great lines, life these days is “objectively better but subjectively worse” — and if so, why?
But my own life has changed a little over the last month, and George’s brain keeps me on my toes; and his prompt has therefore been a nice entry point to a little reflection.
I’m leaving Blank Street. Big news! In the last few weeks, the shop has lost multiple baristas, actually. First Carol, my bestie, left after miscommunications and frustrations with management (she’s going to be a shift lead at a cafe in Central Square — upgrade!). Then Emily, the shift lead who taught me the ropes many months ago, clashed with corporate over some micro-managerial workflow updates and, one climactic afternoon, put in her two weeks. I’m the third. (Well, fourth, if you count Toni, but Toni worked like three hours total.)
So what’s the deal?
I worked at Blank Street for nearly eight months. It was a pretty standard corporate barista job. Here are all of the things I would do in my day-to-day. I’d pull espresso shots one after another with the click of a button on our $50,000 Eversys machine; float said shots over iced drinks or build the base for hot drinks; steam whole milk (best), oat and almond milk (okay once you get the hang of it), and skim milk (literally satanic — what Tenzin calls his “soul-enemy”); mix syrups with milks and pour them over ice again, and again, and again; measure’n’sling matcha; add cookie butter or cherry glaze to cups; mix sticky substances in pitchers and try not to inhale the fumes; wipe the counters; take customers’ orders with flair and enthusiasm; fix customers’ orders when they “just really wanted it iced”; wash dishes (when everyone is driving me insane); organize the miniscule back room; restock cups and lids and napkins and syrups and ice and matcha and what have you; make drip; sweep; wipe the tables; wash the windows; change the trash bags; deep clean the equipment; and, when in need of a release, flee to the dumpsters to empty the bins.
I probably spent about 800 hours doing that. At a conservative 30 drinks per hour, I probably made 24,000 drinks. Call it 15,000 matchas and 9,000 coffees. Call it liquid character development. Long ride!
But the Blank Street I am leaving is not quite the same one I joined eight months ago.
When I arrived, the baristas were reminiscing about a time when the company was a great place to work. Pay and benefits were relatively strong, real trust was placed in employees, and each store was made individual by its staff and their connections with customers. Sure, the chain was expanding rapidly, and yes, Blank Street is basically a VC-backed tech company masquerading in the coffee business (all centered around that $50,000 espresso behemoth), but for a while it was not so bad.
By my start date, the attitude was more ambivalent. My coworkers weren’t quite satisfied with the job benefits anymore, particularly the health insurance, and were a little uneasy about employee agency and dignity. They were entering increasingly rocky footing with management. These sentiments grew when, in response to a Boston unionizing push, Blank Street hired the notorious anti-union law firm Jackson Lewis to draw out negotiations. Well over a year after baristas voted to unionize, talks are still pending. It doesn’t matter if the baristas are college kids, or have demands that center as much on not wanting to wear branded headscarves as on health benefits; a year is slimy. It’s too long.
While I was there, things got worse in small but telltale ways. One day the “manual steam” option on our espresso machine was gone; we now had to steam milk with an automatic timer to supposedly regulate the temperature of our hot drinks. But any barista with a smidgeon of care about product quality will tell you this is ridiculous. Each milk type requires its own steaming technique and duration, so the result of this “standardization” was serving burnt almond milk and scalding oat milk. What’s more, after about four months our manager realized the machine was calibrated wrong and was scorching all the milks.
Then, before long, two new buttons on the machine introduced the “auto-steam” function, which literally did the steaming for us — we just placed a pitcher below the spout and pressed a button. The auto-milk is not as good as hand-steamed milk; it’s heavier and less fluid, and there’s not enough to fill a cup to the brim. The argument is that it’s helpful during rushes and that customers can’t tell the difference, which I think is a slight to customers. It’s also a slight to baristas. It eliminates the primary skill the role involves.
Corporate also micromanaged our process for making drinks. They would reorganize our equipment, mandate specific arrangements for syrups and other ingredients, and adjust where labels were printed and drinks were displayed in ways that disrupted the workflows we’d carefully calibrated. They made these changes for the sake of standardizing across all stores, and always without consulting the baristas doing the actual work. They also made them so they could track our productivity, creating set-ups that made drink crafting more difficult but facilitated the process for baristas to time each order on an iPad. The data they acquire from this timing is used for “scheduling and personnel decisions.” That’s the kind of hazily threatening language that sets off alarm bells among staff.
Of course, it’s not our managers’ fault. The two higher-ups who have instituted these shifts — our store manager and the Boston product manager — are quite sweet and a little bumbling; they’re more or less competent at their jobs and exceptional at not questioning anything about them. They care about the baristas, sort of, in the sense that they are regular people, and like connection, and like to feel upstanding. They frame the changes as exciting, and I think it’s genuine; in the most milquetoast, docile way, they’re bought in to Blank Street’s idea of progress. They’re both good people. I like them.
The larger structure is also nothing unusual. It’s how VC and private equity operate; it’s the streamlining and standardization and automation and expansion that are proven to generate value for shareholders. And it’s working. Blank Street is opening a bevy of new stores, both in Boston and across the East Coast and the UK. Profit is booming. The coffee is more or less the same as ever. And anyway it’s not like it’s Amazon, where quotas mean people are forced to choose between getting fired and not using the bathroom to the point of getting a UTI, or where delivery drivers have a road injury rate of 1 in 5 because of the overwhelming quantity of drop-offs.
But it does just suck. It’s the worst to feel it happen in your workplace — the way tiny changes in workflow, monitoring, and management are also changes in atmosphere, in relations with peers and supervisors, in customer interactions, in store identity. It’s no fun to feel the character of a company change (or reveal itself) for the worse, or to try to maintain some kind of affection or loyalty to a place of work while what you value about it is pushed aside. And it also hurts the customers, who often walk into a coffee shop for the sake of the people — especially in an age of increasing automation, when the relative scarcity of human engagement is increasing its value.
My hope is that Blank Street will hit a tipping point: that its fast-track corporate villainy will catch up to it, that automation and tracking and streamlining will no longer produce gains, that people will finally recognize its mild evil for what it is. But that probably won’t happen. Most of the baristas who have been around long enough to recognize the company’s changes get squeezed out, like Carol and Emily; they’re replaced by college kids looking for work who don’t care about more than an income. That’s fine and good and an important function, but it’s also part of the business model — an expendability, a reliance on turnover to minimize discontent and resistance. Soon baristas will probably be tracked for productivity using video and AI data analysis, which will be introduced as another exciting, good-for-everyone change; but by the time things become that blatant, Blank Street will be too big to be concerned, and anyway, people will still take the jobs.
That is the system. That is how growth works. You build a business based on a very slight niche; you put on moral and interpersonal blinders; you standardize, track, and automate; and this lets you expand. Blank Street is a great case study because it’s so completely banal. More than any corporation I can think of, it is just following the formula.
What I don’t like most is that the mechanism relies on — exploits — the genuineness of its employees. Customers don’t feel welcomed by Friendly Barista #3; they feel welcomed by the particular personality of Carol, or Kalia, or Lauryn, or Leta. That genuineness is financially valuable to Blank Street, even as they’re doing their best to stamp out any other evidence of the specific humanity from which it stems.
That’s because the constellation of trust, freedom, individuality, consent, dignity, and self-possession that constitute individual humanity always involves ambiguities and contradictions and deviations from a norm. In other words, humanity is idiosyncrasy; it’s the quality of being singular, a unique person composed of unique experiences and predilections; and that doesn’t fit smoothly into the formula. It’s also, I think, one of those deep fundamental goods. Like justice.
I’m pretty sure George doesn’t know I worked at Blank Street. I suspect he thinks of me spectrally, an aura of mingled annoyance and excitement, of work he doesn’t want to do and an occasional brain-thrill out of left field. I’m also not sure he would consider the growth (and yet decline) of Blank Street Coffee, the most boring corporate structure ever, a question of justice; he’d rather read his Hofstadter and contemplate the design of his own genius. In lots of ways, that’s fair.
But George is in seventh grade, and he already gets that ideas like “justice” or “humanity” are subjective and socially constructed. He might grasp that when my manager introduces a new automated function or a new tracking system with genuine excitement, he’s creating a homogenizing architecture of values the company would like baristas to occupy. What I’m saying is that singularity matters for the social presence and continued evolution of a concept like “justice” — and singularity is the quality most anathema to the corporate formula.
That’s one of the reasons I like George. He’s an oddball: he’s taller than me and supremely limby, a fencer (though I think very bad), occasionally sweetly spasmodic, prone to falling asleep out of the blue, opinionated, foot-shuffling, and intellectually funny. He’s very much his own guy. He’s got his Hofstaeder and his two lenses of language and thought, and that big brain capable of understanding his own limitations, which is to say aware of his subjectivity, and he’s got excitement about ideas that pull him out of himself, and those are the qualities we need, those are the conditions for idiosyncrasy and humanity, for generating it in oneself and inviting it in others, and to me that sounds sort of like justice; and that makes me grin.