Thanksgiving morning, owners of a hipster Colorado coffeehouse chain, ink! Coffee, awoke to find themselves at the center of public controversy. One of their advertisements, a sandwich-board positioned on the sidewalk in front of one of their Denver locations, read “Happily gentrifying the neighborhood since 2014.” This proved offensive to longtime residents who have watched their affordably scruffy urban neighborhood, Five Points, undergo rapid economic change (such as the opening of hipster coffeehouses) in recent years.
The shop itself was vandalized—the offending sandwich-board was seized, a window was broken, and the front of the shop was spray-painted with the slogan “WHITE COFFEE,” the Denver Post reported.
The mortified coffee company went into full grovel mode, apologizing multiple times for what founder and CEO Keith Herbert called its cultural “blind spot.” That didn’t help much. According to the Mercury News, by Saturday, 200 protesters had surrounded the shop. It wasn’t good for business.
Who knows how long it will take for the shop to recover from its pariah status? The neighborhood’s city council representative, Albus Brooks, has called for his constituents to boycott ink!. That would of course leave the baristas with some time on their hands. Not to worry: Brooks has plans to keep them busy. The councilman is demanding that the workers complete “cultural competency training” in order to make amends.
Brooks tells The Scrapbook that the sign personally angered him. Though he appreciates the corporate pleas for forgiveness, he believes “this issue is about reconciliation.” Ink!, he says, should “allow us to give them an individual who trains cultural competency,” and they should “look to hire folks from our community just let out of jail,” in order to “learn from and understand” the Five Points neighborhood.
Ideally, Brooks says, all businesses in his district would be required to have their employees submit to this kind of re-education. He reasons that if he, as an elected official, takes time to sit down and talk with the elders in his community, why shouldn’t ink! Coffee? “What is a business but a community organization?” Which is almost a perfect description of the sort of enterprise that could be a literal nonprofit.
