Cafe goes woke, then broke when its exclusively queerBIPOC workers demand reparations from owner

Drama in r/philadelphia about the coffee shop here but first, let's learn about its roots.

This article is a puff piece about the café written about a year ago.

Choice quotes:

Parikh brainstorms a headline for this story: “Check Out This Incredible Cafe — Also, This Is the Background of the People. And Can You Believe They Do This While Being This?”

Is it really that shocking that queers and BIPOCs are capable of holding jobs? Maybe I'm giving them too much credit.

Queer-owned food businesses like Mina’s World, where a safe, inclusive culture is prioritized and workers are paid fairly and treated with dignity, often find themselves in a double bind. Do they want to be represented as a coffee shop first and foremost, one that sells crispy spinach-and-onion pakoras, creative chai lattes, and ceramic incense holders made by local artists? Or is the cafe a queer- and trans-inclusive community space where the mission and identities of the owners are foregrounded?

“Mina’s World is not the perfect workspace or a queer utopia, but we’re trying to make it as harmless as a space as possible.”

Limiting access to the shop also limits Parikh and Egghart’s ability to dispel certain pretensions associated with coffee. Third-wave coffee culture can feel exclusive and white; Mina’s World wants to present an image that counteracts that notion. “Coffee is a luxury item, it’s a privilege,” Egghart says. “It can be gatekept or put on this pedestal.” In other words, good coffee should be accessible and not intimidating.

Now for the implosion:

Trying to be understanding and open minded but all I’ve gotten from the instagram videos posted by the owners and staff is “harm” was committed and it can be fixed by helping to crowdfund a transfer of the property from the one owner’s rich mother into employee ownership

If there was wage theft or mistreatment of these workers in someway I support them but right now it’s just a bunch of vagueness being tossed around.

yes it's super....weird. all of it. that video they posted was like a hostage video for ransom. since no one involved will come out and say what the actual harm is, it seems from piecing together IG stories that the staff want the owners to turn the biz into a co-op for reparations (?) as gentrifiers (?) and are getting resistance from 1/3 of the owners who happens to be kate's mom and is wealthy. it just seems weird coming from a biz run by POC and trans folks. of all the businesses to come for, they chose this one?

They come for this one because these guys would let themselves be bullied out of the place based on stated values.

there's a certain philly community group that has a weekly "reparations" thread where people of color ask white people to come to their house and do chores, yardwork, or just straight up venmo them money as penance for being white. and it gets a fair amount of replies from white people.

Here's the Insta of one of the workers, which has more context, but I don't have Instagram so I can't get the full drama.

stupidpol weighs in too:

Grievances which include, verbatim: “Ableism in the form of inaccessibility, etc etc”

This Kafkaesque nightmare is darn near turning me hetero istfg

this is unironically the best karma these frickers can get, they promote wokeism as a way to divide workers and destroy unions, serves them right that they might lose their business over it