Tip Cups

I worked at Bart's Homemade in college for about five years.  It was predominantly an ice cream shop, but it also was a coffee and espresso bar and we had sandwiches and bagels and home made cream cheeses and pies and cakes and stuff.  Bart's was right in the heart of downtown Amherst just as going green and buying local was becoming trendy.  It was all counter service and I spent arguably more time there than anywhere else.  The only two rivals would be with the UMass Minuteman Marching Band anywhere in the US and Canada (any time spent with them felt like a place) or in my gross college party house.  But I think Bart's has got to be up there.  

I still talk to my boss occasionally and I met some of my favorite people from that time in my life there and had a lot of important life moments there and learned a lot there about business and about food and about coffee and about myself.  I also learned my new favorite managerial tactic from my boss there.  It was very hard to get fired, but it was easy to be forced into gross cleaning projects.  I regularly forgot to defrost croissants and bagels. Therefore, I had to spend ten hours on my hands and knees in snowpants and snowboard goggles with a cup of hot water and a paint scraper cleaning the freezer floor.  I don't think it had been done since the eighties. You could either take the cleaning project, or you were fired.  If you did your project like a man and didn't bitch, all was forgiven until you did something else dumb, or showed up late, or were particularly sassy.  I thought that was good discipline.  

We were an akward family there and we fought like siblings and we smoked countless cigarettes out the side door with the hair dressers and I must have consumed gallons of diet soda and it is the place I developed and honed my burger relish recipe and probably single handedly kept me from starving.  I found out I liked breakfast sandwiches working there.  I find that so hard to believe I didn't know I liked egg sandwiches.  I didn't know I liked a lot of things until my boss, Tina, told me to stop being a wuss and try it.  

These are my tip cups that were kept in my mailbox.  We used to tip out and leave our money in these.  It was how I afforded cigarettes for the most part.  And sometimes beer.  And any weird items I found lying around or gifts from the particularly bizarre Bart's customers would be kept there.  Everyone had one and we'd decorate them as days went on.  It was always weird when someone quit and they took their tip cup and it was no longer part of the line up. 

Bart's closed not too long ago.  Maybe a year or two (you saw the keys to it).  I think I can get rid of my tip cups and call it good.  

Oh, and here's an apron I stole from Bart's, too.  I also threw that out.  I have a cute one now that my mom bought me.