By Sam Klein
December 4, 2017
Paulina is a barista at Madman Espresso, located at University Avenue and 9th St. She has been working there for over two years and has been in food service for five. Paulina immigrated from a small town near Krakow six years ago.
When I moved here from Poland, I didn’t have that many options, because my language was kind of bad. I couldn’t find a better job. Then I signed up for school, and college takes lots of time and you want to focus on school rather than work. I started working in food industry places because you can work full time, you can work part time, you can work weekends if you want. You can manage school and get money as well.
I like contact with people. This neighborhood, it’s very specific because customers are very nice and friendly, and they treat us, maybe not as friends or family, but they are very friendly to us, and they actually know our names, and they know what’s happening in our life. They will come and ask, ‘Hey Paulina, how was your exam?’ or ‘Paulina, how was your holiday?’ ‘How was your weekend?’That’s why I’m working here still. You wake up, and you feel good. We have a lot of students here, so that’s interesting. Celebrities, too; Alec Baldwin always comes in, he always makes your day more interesting.
I open the store, so I have to be there around 7:15. I am there by myself until 8:00, when the second person comes to help me. It’s busy in the mornings. We have everyday customers and when I see them in line I already know what they’re having. We have deliveries three times a week and those days are busy, because the delivery guy comes, and we have to multitask. Wednesdays are the worst, because we have coffee and milk deliveries.
I manage the store a little bit, so I have to make sure that everything gets ordered, so that we have not only cups but sugar and honey, this kind of stuff. I have to see what’s happening with the inventory and then make sure we aren’t running low on small cups, medium cups, iced cups. I have to order cups, lids, straws, stirrers, sugar, honey, and splenda. Unfortunately, the store is very small so we don’t have much storage. It sometimes happens that we run out of stuff because simply we have no place to store it. That looks kind of unprofessional because we are a coffee shop and we’re out of medium cups. It’s not our fault, the company just didn’t deliver it. Every morning I have to open the register as well and count the money to make sure it’s the same amount as the person who closed the day before. I leave at 1 o’clock, count the money and split the tips with the person I’m working with. That’s about it.
I used to work in the Upper East Side, at a coffee shop there. I mostly had a bad experience, unfortunately. I think everything depends on the neighborhood where you work, and the Upper East Side was a cruel neighborhood. People would treat you as a server. Nobody would be nice to you, nobody would smile, people would just walk in and be like, ‘small coffee.’ There was this one lady who would come in every Friday and say, ‘Small cappuccino, but make it fast. My bus to the Hamptons is leaving in two minutes.’ I cried a couple times there.
You want to say something back to them, and you know you cannot because he’s a customer, and everything is about service in this country. There are so many places around and there is so much competition that if you’re not nice to customers, they’ll go somewhere else. I have to take whatever they say because the customer is always right.
I remember once, in the other coffee shop I used to work at, this customer came, and he walks in, and he says, okay, I want a baguette. So I say, okay, which one would you like? And he looks at me and says, ‘you don’t understand? I want a baguette.’ I’m like, ‘oh, sorry, because we have sourdough baguette, we have plain baguette, we have french baguette, italian baguette, poppy seed baguette, we have so many baguettes.’ They’re located very far away, so you’d reach for one, and he’d tell you no, I don’t want that one, I want the other one. He just said, ‘no, I just want a baguette!’ He went so crazy, you know? And I’m just like, I’m asking what kind of baguette. So I give him a baguette. And he says, ‘where are you from?’ So I say, ‘I’m from Poland.’ He’s like, ‘You should take your fucking attitude and go back there.’ Seriously. At that point, I wanted to say something back to him. But I couldn’t, because I’m just an employee, and I just have to smile and say, ‘have a nice day, sir.’
I graduated in May, so now it’s time to move on and find something different. My plan is to move to California with my boyfriend in May. We want to open a coffee shop, something small and cute. He manages a coffee shop uptown, he’s been in this industry for over ten years. I like stuff with coffee, and I think I’m good at it. I don’t know the other side of the business, but my boyfriend knows how to do it, so I think we’re going to be a good team.