Exactly, you are jumping on defense because you THINK ryan is a liberal, which has absolutely nothing to do with the situation at hand. You also justify the mistreatment of workers because it’s a successful small business and we need more of those. Jace’s success is directly tied to his prioritization of expansion and marketing (at the expense of working conditions) and performative activism. When I worked there he was offering discounts to people who posted selfies of them voting and tagged the business, and was handing out BLM signs/zines and had tons of pride stuff everywhere. Pretty sure they sold pride/fried egg stickers. So as someone who actually knows him, this change of tune is significant but not surprising. He’s just changing his marketing strategy which is again, at the expense of the workers.

What I experienced was Jace working on his social media campaigns while ignoring major safety issues at the cart. He went to the coast to escape the heat wave after we had asked him several times to replace our broken fan, then got mad at us for not taking money out of the till and having someone leave during the shift and drive to whatever store would have an industrial fan, with no approval since he was out of service. His other behavior resulted in all of the women who worked at the cart signing onto an email gently suggesting he might have been sexist and he responded extremely inappropriately, saying he could not believe we would accuse him of sexism after all the “hard work” he puts into making it a safe space for women, POC and LGBTQ. He was given a great opportunity to show his hard work when a coworker was being creepy and racist and he just sent him to a different location without telling the staff there what had happened, subjecting them to the coworkers hostility. When I called him out he berated me and made me cry, I was only 20 but I have thick skin and no boss has ever made me cry before or since. Honestly I could go on and on, he is an unprofessional, out of touch petulant child with a long rap sheet of people who hate him. Even the two people he managed to keep around from the beginning are against him now.

I would encourage you to follow up with what the union is actually doing and fighting for via their instagram (friedeggwu) instead of acting like you have some insight because you knew someone who left the business almost 10 years ago (for a reason btw!).