Shot in the Dark Cafe

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How Our Worker Cooperative Works:

Worker Cooperative?

Unlike the vast majority of businesses in Tucson or elsewhere, Shot in the Dark Cafe is owned and operated by its entire staff.

What this means is that everyone who works here owns part of the business, has a share in all profits and has a say regarding all major decisions. No major changes can be made to the business, nor can anyone be hired or fired, without passing a vote of the entire staff.

Why a cooperative?

Some reasons why we believe that this is a better way than traditional methods of operating a business are:

When everyone working for a business has a significant share of decision making power-
- Exploitation of workers is prevented
- Workers take more pride in their work and have a greater sense of empowerment.
- A greater variety of input goes into business decisions.
- Decision-making is less detached from the actual day-to-day operations of the business .
- Unfair income gaps between the top of management and the lowest paid worker are considerably less likely because everyone has a say in setting pay rates.
When everyone working for a business has part-ownership and a share in profits-
They will have a greater desire for the business to be successful.
They are likely to accept an evenly spread reduction in compensation over layoffs if the business happens to come under hard times.
The likelihood of ever going out of business is greatly reduced with liabilities being more evenly spread out.

How do we make it work?

You might wonder how a business can operate this way. You may think that it sounds like we're a bunch of commies and regardless of how much energy and resource someone puts into the business, we all have equal say, equal pay and equal ownership. You may think it's more of an investment sort of thing and we only hire people who are rolling in dough already and are therefore able to buy into the business. While these are both understandable assumptions, we have a much more unique system in place to create a greater sense of fairness and opportunity for everyone involved.

Shot in the Dark Cafe does not have any employees. We are all Members.

“Buying in”- Hiring is done without regard to a prospective member's financial standing. New members do not buy in to the cafe in order to work here. After someone becomes a new member, they have a time period of anywhere from 3-6 months in which to work to earn enough money to acquire a portion of ownership in the cafe. This is all that is required of anyone to stay a part of the cooperative. This does present a hurdle for new members, but it has not proven to be a very onerous one, partially due to the fact that all members eat at the cafe for free whenever they want to. Afterward, all members have the opportunity to work off and/or buy more ownership of the business whenever they want to. There are limits, however, to how quickly a member can increase their ownership in the business, preventing someone with a lot of outside money from being able to own a bunch of the business even if they've only worked here a short amount of time. Also, only members may own shares. The cafe is not a public investment vehicle; members work for themselves .

How we are better equipped to handle hard times than most traditional businesses- There are two types of ownership in the cafe that all members have some portion of. In business terms you could say that one type is pure asset and the other type is asset with liability attached. In layman's terms you could say one type just makes you profit, while the other type makes you profit but also makes you responsible for the cafe's well-being. The ownership which members can work off and/or buy (as described in the last paragraph) is the first type. All of the ownership of this type amounts to 75% of the profit entitlement, but no long-term legal responsibility for the cafe's financial well-being in any way. All of the ownership of the second type amounts to 25% of the total profit entitlement but 100% of the responsibility. It is considered to have no value so members get it for free. How much of this type of ownership a member winds up having is loosely, but not directly, based on how much of the business they own. Each percentage of responsibility earns a small percentage of the profit in exchange for being required to put in a small amount of time (15 min per week as long as business is going ok) at work for free. If we were to come upon hard times though, we have an agreement that the 15 minutes per week would increase, therefore cutting into all of our pay proportionately, but preventing anyone from being let go or the business from going under.

How we make decisions- Decision making is primarily done by member consensus. For very minor or pressing issues, decisions are generally made by the manager and/or whoever is on shift at the time. Most major decisions are decided by a vote. These decisions are either made by a weighted vote or by one person one vote. We do a weighted vote on most things of significant long-term importance to the cafe, like hiring, firing, electing an assistant manager, shutting down (Never!). These votes are weighted by ownership percentage, hours worked, and seniority, but they are not weighted fully and so even if someone had 10 times the ownership and tenure that someone else had, they'd only have about 3 times as large of a vote.. The logic behind this system is that some decisions just can't be made by a vote (the kitchen's on fire! call everyone so we can vote on what to do!), but most decisions can be, and also should be because everyone working for a business has valid opinions and deserves a say in decisions that affect their jobs. The reason that a few of the bigger decisions are weighted is that if someone owns more then they have more at stake, and if they work more or are more tenured then they likely have a greater understanding of what is good for the cafe. The reason they aren't weighted in direct proportion is that regardless of the points made in the previous sentence, these decisions also would affect everyone's jobs. A small number of decisions would require more than 50% of the vote, these are generally things that we'd all rather avoid like agreeing to fire someone or agreeing to close down the business.

In conclusion, by having a business that is owned and operated by it's entire staff, we create a happier work environment in a stable business with greater job security with greater financial opportunity than most workers in the same industry would have. Therefore, we feel that if all businesses operated this way, society as a whole would be better off.