Exploitative Labor Practices, Chronic Understaffing, and Misleading Pay
Pros
The shifts are flexible, and never more than 6 hours unless requested. Time off is usually granted if your manager is nice enough. Still, this shop only cares about maximizing profit and putting their high maintenance customers above the basic rights of their workers. Last quick note is that upper management has the power to move you to a different shop, whenever they see fit and you do not have a say in it’ll.
Cons
I would never recommend working at Caffe Luxxe if you have previous experience in third wave coffee. I also would not recommend it if you do not have any coffee experience. They will take advantage of you and mold you into their compliant protege (hence their 6 month training program). They hire nice, inexperienced, hard working people and make them think that this is how the coffee industry is - hard and exploitive. Luxxe is a machine and it does not put in the same amount of craft that is required of a third wave shop. No scales, no timers, no single origin espresso, no dialing in coffees. However, you will be forced to promote branded lip balms, lotions, and other material items. This place is extremely busy, line out the door for the majority of a shift. They are always short staffed. There’s two, maybe three people working a shift. You’re literally running from task to task trying to do everything. When there’s two people on, someone has to solo bar while there’s a line of twenty people and the other person has to do dishes or take a break. This leaves the cafe incredibly messy and low stocked. Management will respond with how to work faster and more efficiently, instead of properly staffing the shops. It’s exhausting, mentally and physically, and causes burn out. That brings me to the third biggest con. The pay was never as high as they promised. I believe the job posting says once you’re fully trained you’ll make $28-$32 an hour. Let me be completely transparent when I say I never saw a number remotely close to that during my time there. I made at most $24 an hour, with the tips included in that number. Tips are shared across all west LA locations, even if you work at a busier shop and are turning a bigger profit. Everyone that works at Caffe Luxxe knows that upper management takes from the employee tip pool. They will never ever tell you how much tips were made during a pay period. All of these issues yield one of the highest employee turnover rates I have ever seen.
