What Does Success in Coffee Look Like? (Republish)

This article was first published in November 2022, and remains one of the pieces that has stuck with me the most since I started this newsletter. Success and failure often seem very binary, but Amethyst's story shows that there are many levels in between. This piece also feels relevant in 2026, as tipping discourse continues, workers organise for better pay, and more coffee companies pursue alternative business models.

What does success as a coffee company look like? Growth in revenue and locations? Being acquired? Or is it something harder to quantify, like making a difference for your community and your employees?

If success is difficult to pin down, then failure is even trickier to define. For instance: Is choosing to close down your coffee business on your own terms, having made a real impact, really a failure?

In May 2020, as coffee shops across the United States began to reopen after the sort-of lockdowns that followed COVID-19’s arrival, Amethyst Coffee Company made an announcement: The Denver-based business was eliminating tips and raising its prices by 50% across the board, in an effort to pay its staff a proper living wage.

The price of a latte, previously $4.50, was raised to $6.75; mochas went from $5.50 to $7.50. This increase would let the company pay its baristas $50,000 per year, according to a somewhat breathless CNN article about the move that was published in August 2020.

Two years later, Amethyst announced its closure. The implication in several news reports was that the price hike was responsible. “A Denver coffee shop that vowed to pay workers $50K is closing”, wrote the Denver Business Journal in an effort to connect the dots. 

But as founder and co-owner Elle Taylor told me, that wasn’t the whole story.

‘What if No One Comes Here? What if the Prices Are Too Scary?’

Coffee shops and restaurants raising prices in a bid to eliminate tips isn’t a new phenomenon. In 2015, Bar Nine in Los Angeles announced it would do just that in order to guarantee its employees a living wage. That move was inspired by the restaurateur Danny Meyer, who made a similar move at his restaurant group a year earlier, while Thomas Keller’s Per Se arguably started the trend in 2005. (Both Keller and Meyer’s policies proved controversial, to say the least, and Meyer went back to tipping in 2020.)

Eliminating tips had always been Amethyst’s goal, according to Taylor, but the time had never felt right to make the move. “We had really wanted to open Amethyst in 2015 without tips, but I was kind of scared—what if no one comes here?” she said. “What if the prices are too scary for people?”

After discussing the idea with staff, there was a split between those who wanted to work for tips and those who, like Taylor, didn’t. Ultimately, Taylor felt that it was unfair to force that decision onto her staff, who spent more time behind the bar and would have had to bear the brunt of any bad reactions from customers. “We just couldn’t really ever come to the conclusion that it was the right time to take away tips”, she said. “And then the pandemic happened”.

With COVID surging and front-line service workers placed in the public eye like never before, spring 2020 seemed like the ideal time to try out what is still quite a radical idea. “We really just tried to seize the moment, and we had been talking about this for years so we were really prepared”, Taylor explained.

With both Taylor and business partner Breezy Sanchez working more often as baristas, they felt like they could handle the possible negative reactions from customers. And the response was largely positive, Taylor said. “I think people were at a point where they were very aware of the struggles of working-class people to make ends meet”. (As Taylor pointed out, $50,000 isn’t even quite enough for those living in a city like Denver—in 2020, the personal finance publication GoBankingRates calculated the living wage in Colorado as more than $74,000.)

I remember being impressed after reading about Amethyst’s move (and later writing about it for my news roundup). At the time, I wrote, “This whole thing seems like a no-brainer. Pay people more, they’re happier and more secure, they work harder, they give better service, your customers are happier. The price increase (that the company says is roughly 20-30% once tipping is accounted for) is really not that much”.

But was it sustainable? Would customers continue supporting Amethyst as the pandemic wore on, and as many people’s perceptions of service industry workers shifted back towards the baseline?

The Beginning of the End

What I found when I first spoke with Taylor at the end of August 2022 was that it was sustainable, but the toll of the pandemic meant the willingness to stay open was no longer there. “We’ve been able to keep it going”, Taylor said. “We have closed two shops since then, but it’s not really related to the tips—we’re also just kind of on our way out”.

At the end of October, Amethyst announced that it would close on the 31st. It had been coming for a while: A Denver Post article from 2021 opened with the line, “Elle Taylor and Breezy Sanchez are burned out”. Even when they raised prices in 2020, the owners were thinking about selling.

“There’s a lot of shiny ideas about owning your own cafe and being the person that makes the choices”, Taylor told me. “And some of them are really true, some of them are shiny and fun and beautiful and really fulfilling. But a lot of them are really terrible and sad”.

Being responsible for the livelihoods of 17 people pre-pandemic, and six after reopening, took its toll. Issues with landlords didn’t help, in a city (and a country) with skyrocketing commercial rents. By 2022, Amethyst had gone from four cafes and a roastery, as of 2019, to just its original location, and was finally able to find someone to take over the lease.

It was a quiet, bittersweet end to a business that offered a different model for valuing its employees and community. Ultimately, Amethyst was an experiment that Taylor looks back on with pride, and some ambivalence. But it hardly feels like a failure.

A Different System

“Coffee shops are meant to be this space for people to feel safe and seen and loved, and be part of a community”, Taylor said when we spoke again later that year. “I think that we did that really well, and in that regard Amethyst was a very big success. And from a coffee industry standpoint we also did a lot of good and we did a lot of pushing socially, and our people really cared about coffee. So again, from that standpoint, Amethyst was very successful. It did what it set out to do, you know?”

Taking a step back, however, is where the ambivalence starts to creep in. “From the more political lens of, did we materially effect change? That one is a little trickier”, she said. “On the one hand, I do think we really pushed both the coffee community and the community that we serve to think differently about how workers are treated and what it means to have real solidarity with the people you work with. But also, at the end of the day, I think it really revealed that even at a place like Amethyst, we often came up short”.

Taylor and I also discussed the recent launch of an unlimited coffee membership by Go Get Em Tiger, and the need for more experimentation in the coffee industry. “There’s this idea where if somebody tries an experiment like that, and then they stop doing it, it’s like, ‘Oh, well, it failed, and it was bad’”, Taylor said. “There’s this idea somehow that it has to be perfect, or if you’re changing or moving around, that you’re failing. Which is just not the case”.

In the years since, other coffee shops have experimented with the no-tipping approach. The concept remains a hot-button issue—articles about “tipping fatigue” have become common in the last few years.

Vancouver’s Cowdog Coffee opened in 2024 without tips from the beginning. That same year, the Salt Lake City-based Three Pines Coffee announced a no-tip policy, with owner Nick Price directly referencing tipping fatigue as one of the inspirations for the move. “I look forward to seeing if any other businesses in Salt Lake jump onto this because I do think people are sick of tipping, and this is the future of our industry”, Price told Indy100.

For some in the industry, Amethyst’s story has become a kind of object lesson for the risks of paying staff too much. On its face, it’s a simple story: Cafe eliminates tips, raises prices to support higher wages, and then shuts down. A LinkedIn comment from a coffee company CEO noted that “There’s the famous case study of the cafe business in Denver that raised prices 50% to pay a better wage, and they went out of business within a year. It doesn’t always lead to success”.

But that feels like a faulty synopsis. Taylor and Sanchez tried something different, pushing Amethyst in a new direction and encouraging their community to come along. If it weren’t for the pandemic, it could well have succeeded. Either way, Amethyst’s example continues to show that different approaches are possible, and that paying staff the bare minimum doesn’t have to be the norm.

As well as more companies experimenting with tip elimination, other models are already taking shape. The rise of worker-owned cooperative cafes, farmer-owned coffee roasters, and non-traditional forms of funding offer alternatives to a corporate-dominated coffee industry.

Ultimately, deciding to close a business doesn’t mean that it was a failure—particularly when it still has lasting resonances years later. As Taylor told me, “I think a big conclusion of Amethyst is that, if we really want to see a different world moving forward, we need a different system”.