Pros
My fellow FOH employees were generally kind/ easy to get along with as friends, and the central location of this cafe makes it an easy commute from most places in Cambridge/ Somerville. The customer base is usually kind and consistent albeit sometimes aloof. They also pay standard minimum wage against tips which is better than most tipped positions in Boston.
Cons
Where to even begin.... 1. They require every employee to take tests on their ability to perform their job. These are administered by people who do not work in the shops and therefore don't understand the cafe's work flow, and are administered in the most haphazard and inconsistent ways (the 3 people who are allowed to give these tests are very degrading in how they speak to employees, have no consistency between how these are given or what criteria they use, and like to fail people for no reason in order to assert dominance or to be able to give another round of tests which is their only job at the company). You aren't allowed to do anything unsupervised until passing the tests which they only give after multiples weeks of doing your job unsupervised.... tell me how that makes sense. 2. The GM of the shop isn't allowed to interview new hires (only the owners of the company) and therefore tons of random, inexperienced people are placed in this cafe. The owners will straight up lie in your initial interview about your pay, hours, and possibilities of promotion and then you'll be working for half the hours you need to pay rent and making next to no tips (when they said it would nearly double your hourly pay). 3. Despite being female and queer founded, I have never worked anywhere that such rampant sexism against women and female presenting folx occurs and where cis men are allowed to do things against health codes or with crazy rudeness to customers with zero penalty (they even have an "extra hard" test that only female presenting folx have to take.... they deny this when asked about it yet the facts speak for themselves). They allow cis men working at higher levels in the company to maintain employment despite walking out of shifts because they're "tired", allow them to speak down to queer folk who work there, and just generally create the most heinous environment to work in. 4. They don't care AT ALL about health codes, cross contamination, allergies, etc and as a person to whom this would be a problem I couldn't get over it. I worked for months to try and get people to care about cleanliness to no avail. 5. They struggle more with staff retention than any business I have ever known. I was hired after nearly the entire cafe quit at once due to the above reasons, and now they're hiring rapidly again due to the same issue and the management seems to not care I tried for 3 months to get some of these issues fixed through repeated talks with the GM and was ultimately told that nothing would change and I was replaceable. During my time I was promoted and then backed out of that promotion before even beginning it due to crazy power trips from higher management that I wasn't willing to succumb to. They aim to either make you submit to their bad management or force you out.