Why do people go to little coffee shops? by Gracie Gardner

Why do people go to little coffee shops?

To savor a morning ritual? To support a local business? To experience community?

Or is it to approximate closeness with someone who is trapped behind a counter and cannot leave? To have a pretend mommy who gives you sweet foamy milk in a see-through cup? Is it so you can order someone around first thing in the morning? And they have to do what you say because their livelihood depends on it? Do you need to practice holding power over someone else before your day can really start?

Milo’s play Business Ideas studies the vulnerability of service work with the measured pressure of an espresso tamper compacting coffee grounds into a puck. Despite being set in a coffee shop, the stage directions never actually mention the exchange of coffee for money. That’s sort of besides the point. What they’re really buying is a brief moment of being perceived as important. If they don’t get this, they’re dissatisfied. When one customer becomes impossibly particular about an order, there is no way to get it right, the barista Patty grits through her teeth: “I really want. To make it perfect for you.”

When I was a barista, I tended to register those long winding orders as a cry for help. A coffee order can go on so long it turns into emotional transference. Do people who are in a rush know they can make coffee at a pace of their discretion from the convenience of their own homes? Another customer, who claims to be a surgeon, takes it to Yelp: “Because coffee was given to me slowly, a woman died.” Later, Patty worries: “I somehow have not been told the secret… that everyone else has been told.”

She isn’t the only one. At a table in the cafe, the titular Business Ideas are being frothed up by a recently laid-off mother and her college-bound daughter, doomily brainstorming a Shark-worthy plan to raise tuition funds. Every proposal mom makes has mom extracting labor from her daughter, compromising her morals, or confusing hard work with access to capital. They circle around solutions to invented problems, but get jammed up in the execution. Nothing is viable. The closest they get to something they could actually accomplish is by rebranding things that already exist. Mom pitches: “everyone ‘has’ artichoke. but only our artichoke. Means sex.”

In the world of Business Ideas, the people in power are unknowable and nameless. Parent and child are business associates. And Patty is $80,000 in student debt and working for minimum wage. It’s a play that captures that queasy catch-22 of Milo’s generation: they graduated from college at a time when entry level positions required years of experience, downstream of boomers refusing to retire because they linked their value to their productivity, and media outlets blamed their financial precarity on their coffee habits.

But really… What a bargain is five dollars to be in charge of something for a change? Even if it’s just a tiny baby cup of espresso? To indulge in a ridiculously exacting request of what you want? Will you be ready to face the indignity of your day ahead as soon you get your large cup of warm sugary milk?