Killer E.S.P. in Old Town, Alexandria, Virginia–what a wonderful little hangout. I hadn’t been keeping up with the place since the lockdown, but it turns out things have been weird:
(1) The owner has been sexually harassing and possibly assaulting the largely young female staff members
– brushing up against them and touching their breasts, pressing his crotch against them to “squeeze by” behind the service counter
– told his manager he wanted to hire only “sexy fucking girls”
– when manager suggested a uniform incorporating an apron, like many coffee shops, he said he wanted his staff to dress like “cute little hookers”
(2) He’s an insane Trumpist: he said Trump would make America a paradise and that Biden is a terrorist
(3) He is a covid denier: He declared the cafe a mask-free zone and mocked and berated staff members for wearing masks and told them not to enforce state and city mask mandates
(4) Cleanliness problems: More in the articles linked. Disgusting
(5) The staff quit en masse in the summer: There’s a crowdfund site for them.
(6) The new staff quit en masse again last month
(7) Local suppliers (the place used to carry really good pies) cut him off after a bunch of insane tweets on the cafe’s business Twitter account. These included speculating that the George Floyd murder video was faked and anti-BLM statements.
Insane. Just insane. Had a lot of good times there. Met friends there so many times. The baristas were such nice people. So sad.
At least his insanity is about to kill his business. For some folks with the same delusions but in other locations, business skyrockets.
I’ve known more than one small business where the owner eventually went nutso and figuratively blew the place up. Many people who’re a little on the edge find it hard to work as an employee and end up in small business for themselves.
Between the absolute power of being the owner, and the severe pressure of actually running a small business for a livable-onable profit, the combination is not good for someone already mentally on thin ice.
I hope so. I don’t know how many people actually follow the local news closely enough. It took me five months to catch up. And a lot of tourists go by that place. He is a notoriously bad business manager, but he has been able to keep the place going because it’s in a fantastic location and brings in a lot of business.
If he can’t keep employees or if the local City health department decides to look carefully and regularly at the food hygiene issues, he’ll fold. Maybe not as fast as you would prefer or as he deserves, but most bad actors get away with a lot before they come to their end.
Makes the days of Pat Troy’s, who was merely a Reagan fanatic, seem quaint. (I used to go to a party every year in Old Town and we’d go to Pat Troy’s on Sunday, but haven’t been back in awhile, our online group that used to meet up every so often got killed by Facebook.)
I wish I could care, but what nowadays is called “Old Town” is a travesty on the King Street of my youth, when we spent $1 on a double feature at the Reed and then ice cream cones at High’s across the street. These days you need a 6-figure income just to gain admittance.
It’s a place I loved and had good times in and met nice people in, so it’s important to me. That doesn’t change because someone tells me that decades ago the neighborhood was different.
Alexandria, Virginia ain’t exactly Trump Land. So I can’t imagine this being a good thing for his business. Maybe he should rename it, Major Kong’s Coffee.
There’s a corner liquor store, right at the end of the street I live on, so for years it was my go-to stop for beer, wine, booze, snacks, ice, any random thing we were out of, like a bottle of ketchup, etc. Super convenient.
The owner, who was almost always behind the counter, was a nice guy. A real hardcore Republican, but that was fine. Had a big display stand at one time with dozens of hardcover copies of George W. Bush’s biography for sale at one point. One time, toward the end of Obama’s presidency, he started bashing Obama while making small talk with me. I carefully said well, I appreciated how he brought the country back from the 2008 recession and saved the auto industry, since I had a job that relied on the auto industry doing well. He sort of shrugged, like saying “to each his own”. I thought it was odd a store owner would risk alienating half his customers like that, but no big deal.
Then a few years ago Syria was in the news for some reason I don’t specifically recall. I stopped at the corner store and the owner was at the counter with a friend, and they were having an impromptu bible study. The owner was poring over the bible so intently he didn’t notice me and his friend had to clear his throat and sort of gesture toward me. The owner turned to me wide-eyed and said “Damascus! See, the bible talks about Damascus right here! It describes exactly what’s happening with Syria right now! If you ever want to know what’s going to happen, it’s all right IN HERE!!” I said oooohkay, will keep that in mind, thanks, finished my transaction and got out of there.
After that I started going a couple more miles out of my way for my convenience store needs.My story is not as crazy as the OP’s, but these days I can only imagine he’s proudly mask-free, and going on to anyone who will listen how Covid is a hoax and trump was robbed of reelection by Godless Communists who are trying to initiate the End Times. No thanks.
I was in a cafe in Jasper, Arkansas in October and they had a sign saying “If you are not wearing a mask we will assume you have a health issue that prevents you from wearing one. If members of our staff aren’t wearing a mask assume they have health issues preventing them from wearing one.” The place as absolutely packed and not a single person was wearing a mask. Business was booming!
Yeah. Northern Virginia and the rest of Virginia are two different places. He’s finished. The shops’ Facebook page is down, or deleted.
Their own webpage states their Chinatown location is now open. Probably not for long. Also, the sites’ “Contact Us” page has no way to actually contact them.
I never considered myself a hyper-political shopper, and I could probably still justify being a patron of a shop owner who quietly supported Trump or some other republican if I thought he was decent otherwise. But the coffee shop in the OP is over the top.
Yes, and don’t get me wrong, I don’t hold anybody’s political or religious views against them. I did business and innocuous chit-chat with the corner store owner for years knowing his political views, if not so much his religious views at first. It’s only when he started trying to engage and draw me into his worldview is when I said, ok, I’m out.
I heard some crazy stories about him over the years. I never imagined it was this bad. He just seemed like a bit of a stoner goofball.
I had heard a couple of years ago he inherited a lot of money from his parents and then promptly lost it all investing in cryptocurrencies. (I recall him putting out a sign for a weekly cryptocurrency discussion group meeting that apparently met only once. I’m guessing he decided to form the group when he bought a bunch of Bitcoin or whatever, had one meeting, then lost all his money.)
He was notoriously bad with money. Staff often complained that they weren’t paid on time or that he would “borrow” money from the till and then forget, and demand to know from staff where the money had gone. The second location in Chinatown was always a bit of a joke among the staff. It’s amazing he lasted this long.