Anti-Capitalist ‘Pay What You Can’ Café Goes Bust

Masked demonstrators take part in an anti-capitalist protest on May Day in Montreal, on May 1, 2016. (The Canadian Press/Graham Hughes)

A coffee shop in Canada that operated on a “pay what you can” model has decided to shut down just a year after starting operations as the business failed to generate enough revenue.

The Anarchist coffee shop is located in Toronto and began operations in March 2022. In an update on the shop’s website, owner Gabriel Sims-Fewer announced that The Anarchist would shut down on May 30. Sims-Fewer termed running The Anarchist “an amazing experience” that sparked “desperately needed debate” while raising the “blood pressure of Conservatives.” The Anarchist sought to operate in ways that did not “enthusiastically embrace the pure misanthropy of Capitalism,” the owner said while blaming a lack of wealth for the shop’s failure.

“Unfortunately, the lack of generational wealth/seed capital from ethically bankrupt sources left me unable to weather the quiet winter season, or to grow in the ways needed to be sustainable longer-term,” the announcement said. “[Expletive] the rich. [Expletive] the police. [Expletive] the state. [Expletive] the colonial death camp we call ‘Canada.’”

In an FAQ on the website, Sims-Fewer said that the reason why he went ahead with the “pay what you can” model is because he hated how “how everything in specialty coffee is so inaccessible to working-class people and inhospitable to everyone but the white upper middle class.”

The “pay what you can” model was applicable to drip coffee, which lost the shop money. The system was subsidized by more expensive drinks.

Sims-Fewer also insisted that in a lot of his “pay what you can” initiatives, more wealthy people were found to be less willing to pay. “I get people in designer suits paying $1 for a coffee, and unhoused people trying to give me $10.”

A White Male

Sims-Fewer has earlier made posts apologizing for being a white man. On the website, he characterized his gender and race as being privileged and offered to compensate for it by hiring people from minority identities.

“I am a white, cisgender, queer man. When I used to daydream about opening my own café, the idea always left a bad taste in my mouth because I also feel that the world doesn’t need more things owned by people at my particular intersection of privileges,” he wrote.

“The best thing I think I can do is hire people who aren’t white, cisgender, heterosexual men, make them equal owners, and follow their lead in making the place less white-male-centered than the industry standard.”

A July 2022 post on The Anarchist’s Instagram said that “White cis men aged 45–65 should require a Basic Human Decency qualification to be allowed to interact with service workers.”

Another post took a dig at Christianity and the Canadian government. “Wishing the Pope, the Catholic clergy, and the Canadian government the centuries of suffering and death that is all they have ever given the world. Never forgive the unforgivable.”

Employee Revolt

The Anarchist is not the first woke business to shut shop. In July last year, a café in Philadelphia that prided itself on being “queer-owned” shut down after employees revolted against the owners.

The café, “Mina’s World,” was owned by two queer activists, Sonam Parikh and Kate Egghart. Mina’s World promised to treat black and trans employees better than other coffee shops which had white owners.

However, employees at the café soon turned against the owners. In an Instagram post last year, the employees claimed they were facing “systemic employer opposition, manipulation, abuse of power, exploitation, anti-blackness, ableism, hostility, and complete disregard for our livelihoods.”

Employees also demanded that owners redistribute their business to the workers. The workers attempted to raise $200,000 through GoFundMe to buy the building where the shop was located as well as a share of the business. However, the effort only raised nearly $11,000. Mina’s World eventually shut down.