Crumbs and Whiskers Cat Cafe. Check their ig comments for people roasting the CEO for trying to union bust 💯 

I worked at the LA location around 2020-2021. We were all cat lovers that initially accepted the minimum wage pay because of our love and compassion for animals. This is obviously not actually sustainable to live on anywhere, let alone DC or LA. 

The CEO has a whole story…coming from a corporate world, never feeling emotionally fulfilled in her career, quit abruptly, went to Thailand, spent time with elpahnts and at cat cafes there which inspired her to help animals and start a cat cafe in the US. She also spoke a lot about her therapy and mental health journey and wanting to be an advocate for mental health. 

Those corporate roots clearly never left though… none of the workers other than the manager were full time positions, so no benefits at all. There were tip jars and tips on the Square POS system that we had no idea where they went to. Not to us worker for sure and not to the cat rescue partner as far as we knew. It’s also a for profit business, all other cat cafes I know are non profit. 

A kitten died in the cafe on Christmas Eve 2021. My coworker was traumatized trying to rush the poor baby to an er vet, and they passed in the car ride there 😢 What a way to spend Christmas that you already have to work on…..

Everyone was of course incredibly distraught and were expecting the CEO to really step up but instead it was the shortest most generic email barely addressing the situation. No support for the traumatized worker. I was fed up. In her email she said we were free to reach out with any of our concerns so I decided, fuck it. I don’t care anymore and flamed her out. 

I’ll post a Imgur link with screenshots of our email exchange from the incident in the comments if anyone cares lol

If you read the email, you saw she agreed to meet with me to discuss my concerns. Instead I show up one day and my manager fires me. I don’t know if she wanted to fire me herself and changed her mind, actually wanted to discuss and changed her mind, or was planning the ghost and putting the hard job on her subordinate all along. She clearly didn’t have the balls to talk to me face to face. 

Whatever… I collected my unemployment, finished school, got my dream job now and volunteer with a local cat rescue every weekend. 

And now her current workers have also caught on to her hypocritical business practices 🥰 Loved seeing the business stop posting pics on IG after everyone in the comments was just calling her out for trying to stop the workers from unionizing. 

And loved even more seeing the unionization was a success! Good job everyone! This has genuinely made my week. 

5 years ago I was fired after calling out the CEO and now I found out the workers have successfully unionized!! Feeling vindicated ☺️