i wanna be a barista, lalala.

If you would have asked me at the time, I would have said that it was kinda grueling, the pay sucked, I didn't like the customers and it was exhausting. Now that I have an office job of course, I look back at that time, when I wasn't alienated from my product, when I got to interact with lots of different sorts of folks, when I was only responsible for making good coffee drinks, as a sort of heaven. Like any job, it has its downsides, but being a barista is pretty fun and not that stressful (less stress than working a bar). I liked the hours (early morning, done by early afternoon). The only major warning I will say is that pretty much every time I've gotten a service job at a place where I liked being a patron, working there has really ruined the place for me.

I worked as a barista in an independent shop in Indianapolis from 2002-2006. Most of the other employees kinda cared about making good coffee. I think I made the best drinks (and was tipped accordingly), but I learned everything from tons of off-hour practice and following the advice of barista champions I stalked on the interwebs. The facts: • I made about 8 bucks an hour + tips. If I worked the (busier) morning shift, from 5:45am - 1:30 pm, I split about $80 from the tip jar with one other coworker. • If its an indie shop (sounds like it is) you'll spend lots of time chatting up the SAME PEOPLE EVERY DAY. You'll learn all about people's personal lives, whether you want to or not. You may love this. You may hate it. Our shop stayed in business almost entirely based on our loyal customers who came in EVERY SINGLE DAY. I knew that when Philip came in, it was about time to start washing the airpots, when Shannon came in, it was almost time to clock out, and so on. • You're going to be spending a lot of your time washing things. A LOT. • You'll get to pull shots and perfect your craft, and then consume the efforts of your labor, which is awesome. • Unfortunately, while you're perfecting the perfect shot, and working on the perfect cappucinno foam, 90% of the customers are gonna be asking for frozen, sugar laden, starbucks facsimile drinks. Unless you're in a town with a strong coffee culture, or an excellent shop (like an intelligentsia), you'll have to learn to deal with this and not be a snob about it. All in all, I loved the job. I got to be around people I liked, listen to good music, drink lots of good coffee, experiment with barista techniques I read about on coffeegeek.com and made more than adequate money for the undergrad I was. Hope that helps.

I liked it. When I took a cafe job, I told myself I was only going to do it for a year, and that's what I did. I found it most enjoyable when things were challenging: someone called in sick, someone ordered a crazy drink, it was Christmas and we had lines out the doors. Otherwise it could get boring. I learned a lot about coffee, learned how to make drinks properly (my cafe owner was a stickler- we roasted our own beans, back when hardly anyone did), rose to night supervisor, got bored and quit. I started with a great manager who trained us well and did all the same crummy jobs we did, and ended up with a useless one who only liked to sit in the back and eat sample pastries from the vendors. I'm having a hard time coming up with the bad stuff- boredom, I guess. I like hard work, don't care if it's menial. I liked making amazing espressos and cappuccinos for visitors from Europe who were surprised and delighted that we knew what we were doing. I liked getting to know customers. I liked having the cleanest espresso machine at the end of the night, and everything organized and in its place. I liked closing the store with loud music playing and everyone rushing to get everything right and out the door. I liked big tips. I liked experimenting with strange coffee concoctions and trying all the different single-origin coffees we sold. So if you can be pleased by little things and not frustrated at dumb stuff, it's a fun job. I think the worst thing about it might be that once you really know how easy it is to make a decent espresso drink and how very few places actually manage to do that, almost all other cafe experiences become very frustrating. Oh, I got to be the lone barista for the 3-7 am shift at Burning Man back in 1998, due to my coffee experience. So that was pretty cool.

every time I've gotten a service job at a place where I liked being a patron, working there has really ruined the place for me. Lutoslawski speaks the truth about everything but especially that. Also, have you worked in customer/food service before? That in and of itself will be an eye-opener aside from the specifics of working around coffee. If you haven't, look around for service horror stories to brace yourself against. Also, I wouldn't apply if you're not wiling to also do table-service eventually. As that seems to be the goal of management, you should be willing to accommodate your team of co-workers and bosses. Other than that don't wear clothes you're not willing get coffee stains on, and be prepared to have the true coffee snobs get snippy with you. Good luck!

My wife worked at one a while back, and her takeaway was that many of the customers paid money not for the coffee but for the right to treat the employees like crap.

one more thing, nthing, what people have said above, if you've never been in a food service/retail/service position, brace yourself. Working in a coffee shop has far more to do with managing/dealing with people than it does coffee.

I loved it! I worked at a little independent place for three years in college and I long for those days (also work in an office now). The place I worked was a really relaxed work environment--I got to put whatever I wanted on the stereo (usually classic rock), wore what I wanted, and got to snack on the all the other yummy food we sold. The customers were very cool, in my experience (but it should be mentioned that this was in Santa Barbara so it was mostly rich hippies and college kids). The place you're considering kind of sounds like my place--I went in one day to get coffee and was like, THIS PLACE IS AWESOME! (lots of cool art on the walls, good vibe) so I applied. Getting up early is hard--I always considered myself a total non-morning person but I kind of wanted to challenge myself and I totally got used to it--actually came to really like the idea of putting in 8 hours of work and being done by 1 (time FLIES in the morning, especially if you're busy). I wouldn't recommend working at Starbucks (all the corporate rules blow) or--at the other end of the spectrum--a fancy-shmance place that takes coffee WAYYY too seriously (I worked at one of the latter for a month after college, totally out of desperation, and it was just THE WORST-THE WORST...it almost even tainted my previous experience of working in a coffee shop) If you like the vibe of this place, go for it. The place in SB was the best job I ever had.

I worked as a barista for a small, local coffee shop in high school and the first part of college. I miss it and have been thinking about going back to a coffee shop part time. The Good: Getting to know the regulars was a surprise and I still think about some of them from time to time. It was nice. Pulling shots and making drinks was the highlight of the job for me. I really took pride in it, and would love to work with a professional espresso machine again. Watching barista porn on youtube is only making it worse. I also really liked washing the dishes. Seriously. Yes, we had to clean a lot, but it was satisfying. I would go back into the kitchen and just channel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dishwasher_Pete. Getting to know the beans. I got to try all sorts and it really opened my mind. My parents were of the "dark roasts or nothing" variety, so learning that light roasts are actually good prepared me for the current wave of roasting. The Bad: Customers who wanted to talk down to me for no apparent reason. This was especially bad because I was always the scruffiest (hello, stains and weird arbitrary uniform guidelines), but lots of the suburban moms would take it out on me that we didn't do blended drinks. Also, sometimes customers were a little too friendly and it got weird. The gift wrapping. I hated it. We sold tea pots and stuff and offered gift wrapping and I sucked at it so bad. Which leads me to the next point... Weird management. My coffee shop was family owned. One half, the roaster, was very lax on a lot of things. The other half, the business manager, was very uptight. Navigating that dynamic took work. The main thing I grew to hate was the middle managers. A couple were very easy going and just enjoyed working there. A few saw it as their proving ground and a means to step up into something bigger. They had weird expectations and didn't understand why most of us didn't take the job so seriously. Their micromanaging (such as forcing me to spend an afternoon tying bows just to prove I couldn't) ended up driving lots of people away. Take it seriously, as you should any job, but it's not life or death.

I worked in cafés just after high school and throughout college--1989 through about 1993. One thing I can say is that being the artsy latté and cappucino making guy is only one thing you will be doing. Most places you have to rotate, so you end up being on the register, selling beans by the pound, making the sandwiches, washing the dishes, counting the cash, all that stuff. The Rise of the Frappucino was after my time, but at one of the places I worked, they had a "mocha shake"--something every employee hated to make. One of those ice cream-coffee things. Of course, it was the most popular item. My advice is to not be a dick about stuff like that. Not everyone knows or cares that it is sacrilege to drink those things. Good things I remember about these jobs were the forced exposure to people--now I work in an office and see the same folks every day. Back then, I saw a constant stream of regulars and new folks--some of whom were complete assholes, some who were great. Some treated me poorly for the amount of money I made, but that's life. I also learned about coffee roasting. I remember the simple satisfaction of making a beautiful layered double cappucino in a glass mug. And one of the major bonuses of this type of job: It is over when you leave for the day. Hoo boy.