It was one of those stories that pink-haired grievance studies majors whose concept of "business" begins and ends with places to buy coffee, seem to love: last winter, amid "Operation Metro Surge", a South Minneapolis cafe, claiming the ICE surge in Minneapolis was disrupting the neighborhood, took the prices off its menu and told people "pay what you can":
The "Modern Times" has been operating in South Minneapolis for 15 years:
"We've been a hub of this neighborhood for a long time," owner Dylan Alverson said.
These days, it isn't business as usual and Alverson was fed up with pretending it was.
"As soon as you're in crisis, it feels like that's how it's always felt, but it is. It's not normal," said Alverson. "I've been on the line in front of Border Patrol several times, just as someone that lives in this neighborhood, not as a protest. We closed for the protest. Friday was the first protest I've ever gone to."
Alverson exercised his flair for the quick-and-dirty literary reference:
After 15 years in business, the restaurant would become the Post Modern Times Cafe.
"I guess it just has come out of the fact that it has felt like we're living in wartime. It's been a wartime for a lot of people in this neighborhood and in the city," Alverson said.
The daily special: a free meal to anyone who needs it until ICE leaves Minnesota.
You'd have to be a Minneapolis progressive to think this was going to work out especially well. Turns out "crowdsourcing" among professional protesters isn't a very stable business model:
For six months, a south Minneapolis restaurant fed almost everyone who walked through the door, whether the customer could afford the meal or not.
But the donations that kept Post Modern Times afloat are running low. And the neighborhood’s patience with crowds and antisocial behavior around the restaurant is wearing thin.
On Friday, owner Dylan Alverson announced that he will close the restaurant temporarily, starting Sunday, to hammer out a new business model that will still offer some free meals without crowding out paying customers.
The money wasn't the only problem. Vagrancy, panhandling and petty crime and piles of needles increased around the cafe, and freeloaders - some loitering for hours - squeezed out the paying customers. Neighbors had to perform that most difficult of metro blue city maneuvers — play at welcoming the addicts and panhandlers while passive-aggressively trying to get someone to get them out of their hair. The cafe went back to a menu with prices last summer, while still trying to cling to a "business" strategy best described as "suicidal empathy".
But it turns out that even Kristi Noem's ICE isn't as coldly remorseless as economics. It turns out you actually cannot run a business on donations and theater-kid panache after all. "Post-Modern Times" is closing at the end of the year:
“For the last 6 years, I’ve been trying to prove that Modern Times can continue to exist,” he wrote in an update on Instagram. “I’ve exhausted every option without compromising the core fundamentals that make Modern Times what it is.”
While a spring update said that the cafe “had ups and downs” with the model, it struck a positive tone, with Alverson saying that it was “mostly ups, honestly.”
In August, Modern Times temporarily closed to reassess its future. It reopened on Aug. 26 with a return to its traditional model. However, a philanthropic plan was put in place to continue providing free meals to many people in need.
During its donation-based system — it sometimes referred to itself as a “free restaurant” — Modern Times Cafe provided more than 30,000 meals backed by more than 2,000 donations, according to figures provided by the company in August.
Alverson struck a typically blue-city tone in framing the collapse:
"I announce this decision now, with the hope that we can spend the next two-plus months celebrating the nearly 16 years that Modern Times has stood for creativity over cost, kindness over profit, and uncompromising values as a business in this country," wrote Alverson.
That'll show em.
