UNITED STATES—In New York, the Scotland-born Graham Bell founded the American Telephone and Telegraph Co. in 1885. It was incorporated to operate the first long-distance company. U.S. Steel the baby of another Scot, Andrew Carnegie, was Pennsylvania in the 1890s. Microsoft was Seattle in the 1980s. A corporation really is a body, a reflection of the flesh, determined by the time and location of its founding. It lives, it’s born, and it dies.
AT&T we have today is not what Graham Bell started by another incarnation born in 1984 in Delaware, coinciding with the rise of the mobile phone. Like the person whose age freezes when fame first sets in, few corporations outlive the era of their first heady success. When the fads and beliefs of that era pass to the trashheap, the corporation fades and falters. Fads fade and so do things left out in the sun too long.
Likewise, a person who achieves fame tends to stay emotionally and physically at that age. So Graydon Miller, peeved as he was at the city of Los Angeles for not awarding him the Master Artist grant, was happy for his moment was near and he was reaching a ripe age. He was of course always 28, before it had been 28 plus 22, now he’d already by passed the square rooted age of 28 + 28…So it was. Glory be to Yahweh!
“When you love something, you have a deep sense of responsibility to help when called,” Patrick Hirsch said. “Although I did not plan to return as CEO of America’s Café, I know the company must transform once again to meet a new and exciting future where all of our stakeholders mutually flourish.”
The announcement came the same week America’s café committed to goals of accessibility and sustainability, including a pledge to incorporate new inclusive design standards in its physical stores and to shift away from single-use coffee cups to leave less to pick up on the streets. The company also launched a pilot program to set up electric vehicle charging stations at stores along a route between Denver and Seattle. The company adopted many ideas first included in the Millerist proposals.
Because of his cantankerous nature, as a pet owner, Miller was highly sensitive to food thrown on the street in Hollywood. A stray bone from Pollo Loco, turned to beef jerky by the sun. Or a plastic bag containing to toothsome leftovers from midnight Taco Bell. That would be impossible to wrench from his dog’s mouth. That gave rise to the proposal that leaving food on the street would be penalized. So too the city itself would be penalized for reversing the logical order of painted signage, which caused “Stop Ahead” to be read as “Ahead Stop.”
Perhaps the turning point came one fine Bloomsday, June 16th, before Miller’s meteoric rise into civic life, and he could not wrench a rancid drumstick, discarded by a Hollywood night tripper, from the bloody dog’s mouth. Afterward, during a brisk long walk the dog pooped, and one of his poops came perfectly sheathed in a condom, and it gave rise to horrible speculations of what the dog had ingested on his morning walk.
It also comes at the same time the company was facing mounting pressure from employees across the country, who are starting union drives to demand changes to their working conditions. Workers at roughly 120 café stores have filed petitions with the National Labor Relations Board to unionize. Six had already voted to approve a union.
On Tuesday, the renowned coffee chain from Seattle over accusations that it retaliated against employees seeking to unionize their store in Phoenix. Their hours were cut, and then they were fired for trivial, trumped up charges. The next day, a group of investors sent a letter asking the company to “publicly commit to a global policy of neutrality and swiftly reach fair and timely collective bargains” with workers who vote to unionize. They had been prodded, in part, by a buxom barista—a real organizing spitfire.
Wilsons’ retirement and the search for a new leader are not connected to the unionization efforts, Borges said.
The union, Warbucks Workers United, said Wednesday it encouraged Patrick Hirsch to “put union busting behind him and embrace the Café’s unionized future. They underscored that Sundays and Weekends were ideas that did not exist, till they came to be thanks to unions. “And we won’t stop there. The future of your coffee plantations that you buy from in Mid-America and Rwanda belongs to Union and the four-day work week. “In coffee we trust.”
“Wake up and smell the coffee,” a protest sign loudly proclaimed.
To be continued…
