Pros
The coworkers are amazing and interesting people. You have an opportunity to gain knowledge and develop skills as a barista. You have opportunities to look into how the company operates and understand its founding and history. I heard of better experiences in the less busy cafes.
Cons
Your life in this job will have no kind of balance. In some ways, people are okay with that because of the "flexibility" to change shifts with others, etc. Yet, you also can never honestly relax in your off time. For me, I was always just exhausted. If you're able to nap between shifts, it might be for you, though! As a manager, in addition to your own hours being skimpy (though better than others'), you are forced to cut others' hours and maintain "the green" in profit vs expense, but that means few people are making the income they need. Since workers' hours are what they measure profit margins against, they also want to schedule as few people as possible. Their solution to customers complaining (which I never witnessed) that workers were getting their personal orders made before customers was to make the workers use up their break to wait in line. Granted its your choice to stay there to eat or drink rather than going somewhere service is much faster because of working conditions, which is why I rarely stayed for my lunch, but that solution was a creative short-coming to say the least. I was reprimanded a couple times for staying to do the bare minimum of bathroom and kitchen cleaning after I let my own staff go. During the work day, you're scrambling to keep things together and customers notice, and they complain about the conditions of things, but even in the evening you're not allowed the time to prepare appropriately so that the next day runs smoothly. Their kitchen and bathrooms are subsequently, though "cleaned" each night, nothing you'd want to imagine health-wise. During the day, if something comes up (like a person destroying the bathroom) you don't really have time to respond. Then, higher managers, want you to man registers during peak times and want you to ensure others are manning the registers-- while sanitation suffers. At the location I was at, the kitchen was also tiny and customers routinely would have to wait over a half-hour for a sandwich (some just left) during high traffic times. Only two people could safely legitimately be preparing food and when three were, it was still not enough. Also, there was no machine or dedicated dishwasher ( just a steam sanitizer) at the location so that task took up massive amounts of employee's time. Then, on the learning side, there's some things they were very picky about -- that, given the working conditions, were a little ridiculous. For the most part, I valued the knowledge I gained, but they seemed a little left-field with their ideals about recipes vs the operative reality. Their environmental stance gets a C- at best, and they claim to be working on that but they don't listen well to input from concerned staff. They tend to filter criticisms through sales-speak and keywords and respond as such. Also, I mean, if it's important to you-- the elephant in the room is that these white guys (founders) have profited from a cultural appropriation for sure. They are personally unabashed in their "inspiration" being someone else's culture. Lastly but certainly no less important, in a city such as Chicago, I can't believe the level of only white people who worked in the cafes. "They are midwest based" I heard once, but I would venture a statistical significance in the numbers if anyone cared to look.