Saturday. The busiest day of the week. It started with a pretty bad car accident in front of our entrance, so my two closers and I couldn’t get into the parking lot for a bit. Then I found out that my pre-closer called out, and of course there’s no coverage for the five 30-min breaks I have to give. Finally clock on and walk onto the floor, but the handoff involved little to no communication. I didn’t know that our nitro machine was “broken” so there was cold brew in the container we usually put iced coffee in. Some customers for sure didn’t get what they ordered. But i fixed the problem in 30 seconds. We’re out of a ton of product including all but two trays of sandwiches for the rest of the day. No black berries, no dragon fruit, two boxes of strawberry açaí. After only 30 min, a customer’s car died in the drive thru line, at the speaker, while he was ordering. The line started to build so I did the only thing I could think of: i turned off mobiles and I went outside and started order taking door to door - for two hours. The tow truck didn’t pick up the car until 5 hours later. So we closed the drive thru because it was too much to handle with 4 people. We got caught up and cleaned up, so I turned mobiles back on because we needed to make money (at least that’s what I kept telling myself). I gave breaks super late and struggled during each of them. I didn’t get the 3-hour pull done until 7:30 when I usually get it done by 4:30. Didn’t get the tills done until 10 min before we clocked out and left which was half an hour past schedule. And to round it all off, I almost killed one of our last customers for acting like an entitled jackass.

But my team was great. Better than great, they were the absolute very best baristas and friends I could have asked for today. The amount of times I told myself “today is not the day you quit”...I stay for them. I stay so they don’t suffer through days like this with someone who doesn’t care as much as I do about their mental health. I’m not a perfect manager. Most days I’m not even sure I’m a good manager. But when I’m running shift my main priority is my baristas because when faced with really shitty customers and a “make the moment right” attitude, it feels like no one is in their corner so I always try to be.