Mesa coffee shop hopes to turn to co-op business model in an effort to combat poverty

MESA (AZFamily)—Beanchain Coffee near Alma School Road and Southern Avenue is working to be more than a neighborhood cafe. Instead, it’s focusing on tackling important issues in the community, like poverty.

David Baxter and his wife Shannon designed Beanchain to serve as a community hub. It’s open daily, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., but their work doesn’t just stop there.

Like a typical coffee shop, it also sells baked goods and pastries. However, these baked goods are made by a local baker, Rolled Out Bakery, who uses the kitchen and then sells her goods out of the shop.

“We have a little bakery, we roast beans. We have breakfast, lunch and dinner. We do sandwiches, overnight oats, breakfast burritos,” said David.

But what’s not so typical is the tattoo artist who shares the space with owners as well.

“Our tattoo artist started off as a customer, then became a regular, a barista with us, and her tattoo shop that she was working about of already was closing down, and we were like, let’s do it!” said Shannon.

It’s all part of their business model, becoming a cooperative where each member has an equal share in a democratic ownership structure.

“The whole reason that we’re doing this is because we wanted to try to find some system and sustainable ways to address poverty in America,” David said. “We’re trying to build this in such a way that we can eventually become a worker cooperative because we want to see more worker cooperatives, more worker ownership, better wages.”

It’s an idea not too far-fetched for David, who previously worked as a software engineer and has been using those skills to empower the employees.

Their decision to invest everything in an anti-poverty, worker-centered coffee shop is a sacrifice, but one they feel is worth making to be there for the community and serve its employees.

“We have casual voting, we have a form where our workers can propose ideas, debate them and then put them into action. We have teams, marketing and maintenance teams that people have joined and they can take on tasks,” David said.

The goal is that the idea takes off, allowing them to help people stay afloat amid rising costs.

“We pay $15/hr plus tips, and that’s only because we ourselves as a business we are almost breaking even. We are not profitable yet, but when we do become profitable our goal is getting our workers to $21/hr plus tips and then tracking with the living wage in the area,” said Shannon.

The shop is celebrating their one year of being open at the end of the month. Before the brick-and-mortar, they began working out of a cart in 2021.

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