The Coffee Rage

There are 255 Starbucks in New York City and no fewer than 150 independent coffee bars. There are over 500 Dunkin’ Donuts selling more coffee than white doughy products, and quite a few McDonald Cafes which boast of their delicious, not over hot, inexpensive coffee. In addition, there are 1480 diners with their generally bottomless cups, and 325 old style cafes. You might say that coffee is quite the rage, and has been for almost two decades. Where else in the world do you have 24 hour coffee available, and more to the point where else in the world do you have a market for it? Coffee in NYC alone generates roughly 336 million dollars a year in revenue, and provides tens of thousands of jobs directly and many more in the production chain.

All of this brown opulence comes at a human price though. I’m not talking about the growers getting a crappy deal, though FairTrade is certainly a consideration we all must be aware of in this global day and age. I’m talking about the devastating effects of so much caffeine on the body and soul. You might only take in a few cups a day, or a 20 ouncer in the morning and a couple more later midday, and maybe a pick-me-up before going out, or decaf if you’ve found it harder to sleep at night, to you, this hardly seems to be a problem. But the real issues are behind the counter. The 156,000 behind the counter workers are beginning to crack.

Getting a working barrista to admit there’s a problem is like getting a drunk to say he’s an alkie. They just don’t see it that way. Their brewed KoolAid is the provider of wealth and verve, paying the rent and adding zip to their step. But if you reach out among the former barristas, you begin to hear a different story. It’s a story of discomfort and deep unhappiness, a betrayal some say, of the promises of glory that Hyper-Culture seemed to offer.

“We were trained to think that Faster is Better,” said former barrista Kip M, “I bought right into it. It was like being part of something. I called it the Bean Corps.” It didn’t come naturally though, Kip explained “When I first started making coffee, I wasn’t a coffee guy at all. I liked the smell okay, but my parents always drank tea, so I kind of only knew about steeping a pot of tea. In order to work at B — -I really had to beef up my game, they want you to be really into the product, their product, and the only way I was going to make it there was to start drinking coffee. Lots of Coffee.” Caffeine levels in tea are fairly high, but the culture of Tea is more serene and cultivated than Coffee’s Hyper Culture. “Though it’s true that there’s more caffeine in a small coffee than a shot of espresso,” Kip added, “When you’re behind the bar, you’re popping quick shots of espresso, and those little babies add up fast. In a shift, I probably downed 28 shots, sometimes 30. You had to be on your toes, coffee drinkers in New York want their coffee fast, or at least that’s how you feel whether it’s true or not.”

Burn out is high among barristas, as is divorce, mental illness, and clinical psychosis, much of it attributed to simple sleep deprivation. Some barristas complain that their prescriptions for sleeping pills are not being covered by the measly insurance plans that some coffee bars offer. MikeG explained that “It’s a real problem getting sleep with so much caffeine burning through your blood. Ambien isn’t cheap, so I have to parse out when I take it or when I have to use other methods to get to sleep. Other methods? Like, booze, sometimes pot, but that’s not cheap either. That sleepytime tea doesn’t do shit. They should have given us a better health plan. I was really depressed when I left the T — -Cafe, and I thought it was because I missed my friends and the scene so much, but really it was caffeine withdrawal and sleep deprivation. I had to leave, I was tweaked out all the time.”

One dark hidden secret of the industry is the number of rage related incidents that happen in the coffee bars of New York City. Most of the time, these incidents are attributed to individual personality issues, but when you look at it from the outside, you begin to see ominous behavior patterns emerging. Stories of jerky impatient servers taking orders with flakey friendliness all but demanding an order are rampant on the coffee forums. An employee from a highbrow shop sneers at the idea of decaf “Why even bother if you’re not going to have the real thing” he says. Another post tells of a pair of barristas who were recently fired when an eccentric customer noticed that they were making nasty comments about other customers using Morse code by tapping their fingers on the counter. A rare behind the scenes story bemoans the wrecked condition of a break room at one large coffee bar, as if “wild animals” worked there. Another poster to the great acclaim of his peers, explains to the uninitiated about the Thin Brown Line between Barristas and the Customers. “We move, think, and live at a faster speed than you. You may want to be like us, but you don’t know what you ask…Yes, we look down on you poor slow wannabes.”

Some recovering barristas admit that the culture of coffee is very competitive and that not everyone is really right for it. Brown Water, as the weak are called, often overreact in the highly stressed caffeine society. Most seem to agree that it isn’t personal strength or weaknesses that create unhealthy environments, instead, they feel that the whole system is set up wrong. “The rockstar mentality of local-roast heroes and top-bar coffee makers, doesn’t allow for just anyone to move up the food chain. They’re riding on their personal waves, and everyone else had better stay clear,” says JudyD of Brooklyn. “I started out at S — — and about 90% of the time I was just cleaning. They wouldn’t even let me get near the coffee. I moved to J — — after a few months, but they were even worse, it was a year before I had earned enough bean cred to start brewing.” The highest compliments paid are when someone is considered “High Octane” or if you “like their roast” and they ‘ve “got good beans up there.”

A caffeine rehab group in Turtle Bay, called De-Caf, holds weekly meetings to help former coffee workers move back into normal society. They hope that they can affect a change in the existing coffee community by reintroducing workers back into their old workplaces, this time bringing in a new philosophy of Love, moderation and relaxation. So far they’ve not been very successful. Dann Barbey from De-Caf tells how they lose about half of the recovered coffee workers to recidivism. Not without humor, he tells us, “They say, Once you go black, you gonna go back.” Of the others who come to this halfway house, he says “Most of us manage to stay off coffee by becoming strict Muslims, we have to abstain from all stimulants. Others, they just mope around until they find something more important in life than how they feel in the morning.”

“I wake up each day and wonder how I’m going to make it,” said Kip M, “but somehow I make it. I guess that’s just the deal, I mean, right? Only I kinda just wish I’d never seen the hyper side.”