88 MINUTES WITH...Michelle Eisen

The barista who helped organize the first Starbucks union didn't expect to be fighting the company four years later.

- BY CHRIS CROWLEY

HONEY’S BISTRO, a fast-casual café just steps away from the LIRR in Glen Head, features many of the telltale signifiers of 2010s design and menu planning.

A letter-board menu lines the wall, plastic cups are printed with GOOD VIBES SERVED DAILY, millennial pink is used liberally, and white-chocolate–pistachio matcha lattes are on offer. On a quiet Sunday afternoon, Michelle Eisen, a 42-year-old Starbucks barista turned union leader, settles on a wooden banquette, an empty cup in front of her. “This coffee-shop atmosphere was brought to the States by Howard,” she tells me, referencing Starbucks’ mogul-like chairman emeritus and former CEO Howard Schultz. “He nurtured that, and he built that.”

She pinpoints the introduction of the "Unicorn frappuccino" as the moment she realized things were going downhill.

Eisen, who was instrumental in the Starbucks unionization fight that has spread across the country and intensified since November into an open-ended strike at about 150 stores, will often reiterate that the company was once a good place to work. In 2010, when she started at a location in Buffalo, where she grew up, employees were trained well, had decent benefits, and could trust that their shifts would be appropriately staffed. Eisen had a flexible but reliable schedule, which allowed her to juggle hours with another job as a stage manager for local theater companies.

She pinpoints the 2017 introduction of the “Unicorn frappuccino” as the moment she realized Starbucks was going downhill. “They sent enough product to last two hours,” Eisen recalls. The “ridiculous” multi-ingredient drink was evidence that standards had shifted away from quality control to “anything goes.” By 2018, she says, the only insurance she could afford was the high-deductible plan.