Abolish Billionaires
Wealth Inequality | Opus 4.8
Hector hears the customer before he sees him, which is how it goes with that kind of customer.
“Hello? Is this thing on? Is anyone working today?”
The voice cuts over the grinder and the steam wand and the four people already waiting on drinks. Hector looks up from the register. Young guy, mid-twenties, a hoodie that costs more than Hector’s car payment and the kind of watch people photograph. He holds a cup at arm’s length like it’s leaking on him.
They’re two short on the floor. Quinn has been on bar ninety minutes, brown apron over a yellow sundress, short gray hair, QUINN stitched on it and a small they/them under the name in the shop’s house font. Fast, for a new hire. Drowning anyway, six tickets deep, calling names into a crowd that isn’t listening.
A woman had been out front since before open with a stack of union cards, telling everyone who passed that it was time, that people were done being squeezed. Hector took one to get by her and pushed it into his apron without reading it. He thinks of her now, watching the kid check his phone like the room is keeping him waiting.
“This is wrong.” The kid sets the cup down hard enough to slosh the liquid onto the counter. “I ordered oat. This is regular milk. I can taste it.”
Quinn checks the cup against the sticker. Oat, the sticker says. The milk pitcher they’d used, when they bring it to their nose, says someone grabbed the wrong one in the crush; the kind of honest mistake that happens when one person does the work of three.
“That’s on me,” Quinn says. “I’ll remake it right now.”
“Yeah, you will.” He wakes his phone, makes a show of the time. “I have a nine-fifteen. Do you know what an hour of my time is worth?”
Hector steps to the bar. “Sir, the new drink’s already going. Thirty seconds.”
The kid doesn’t look at him. He’s looking at the tag on Quinn’s chest, his eyes catching on the small stitched line and sliding off it. “She ruins a latte and now I’m late. Love that. Great system.”
“It’s they.” Quinn keeps their eyes on the steam wand. “It’s on the tag.”
“Whatever you are.” He laughs, short, pitched for the line behind him, and nobody joins him. Frustrated, he barks, “No, you know what, this is a thing now. This is a service thing.”
He’s already dialing. He turns a quarter away, drops an elbow on the counter, leaves the cup sitting between them like neither of them owns it now.
“It’s me. No, listen. That coffee place I’m always in, the one on Tryon. Find out who owns it.” A pause. “The whole chain, all of it. How much.” A longer pause. He looks at his nails. “So offer more. I want to own it today. Before lunch.” He pockets the phone and finally turns to Hector, the way you look at a fixture you have decided to replace. “Make the drink. I’ll wait.”
Hector makes it himself. Oat. He checks the milk pitcher twice, the way you check things when a man with that kind of phone is watching. The kid takes the cup without a word and walks out into the heat, and the line breathes out, and the morning goes back to being a morning.
Hector keeps hearing the call, though. People say things. People with money say bigger things. Nineteen years behind a counter and he has heard every threat a customer can make, and all of them have evaporated by the next ticket.
The rush thins out by eleven. Quinn restocks cups, says sorry again about the latte, and Hector tells them it wasn’t their fault, which is true. He wants to say the rest of it, that they’re doing fine, better than fine on a short floor. His phone goes off in his apron before he can.
The corporate line. He steps into the back, past the sacks of beans, and answers.
The voice is bright and fast and reading off something. There has been a change in ownership, effective this morning, paperwork to follow. The new CEO has flagged a personnel matter at this location. It uses the initials CEO exactly like that. The barista who served him, and the voice has the name ready, Quinn, is to be separated from the company by the close of shift. It has come down from the top. The voice would like a confirmation.
Hector doesn’t answer.
Through the doorway he can see the floor, the line stacking up again for lunch, Quinn calling a name over the noise and getting it right, smiling at somebody who smiled first.
“Hector? Are you there? I need a verbal confirm.”
He reaches into his apron pocket. The card has gone soft at the corners from the morning. He turns it over in the light from the propped back door. Under the number for the local, under the blank line waiting for his name, two words sit bigger than all the rest, printed to be read clear across a room.
ABOLISH BILLIONAIRES.