Last year, a Toronto man, Gabriel Sims-Fewer, announced the launch of a business virtually no one was asking for: a communist coffee shop.
The cafe was to be called “The Anarchist,” and unlike Outback, they meant it when they said there’d be no rules. Customers were allowed to pay for the coffee as they saw fit, and they could browse through some communist merch as they sipped their drinks too (items that, interestingly enough, did have a price tag).
It was to be a refuge from the ills of peacefully buying and trading with others under oppressive capitalist systems, a “radical community space on stolen land,” they said. A place where anyone could hangout and use the bathrooms, whether they were purchasing things or not.
Truly, if that’s not what a radical utopia looks like, I don’t know what does.
Can’t wait to hear how their socialist commune mass produced all those goods. I’ll wait.
— Hannah Cox (@HannahDCox) May 25, 2022
But, alas, it was not long for the world. Less than one year since their launch the business has folded and their statement explaining the failure is frankly, priceless.
“The Anarchist has been a huge success in every way I hoped, and has given me so much inspiration and education that I plan to put to use in future projects,” it says.
Sir, I’m going to need you to define success right now, right this instance.
“Unfortunately, the lack of generational wealth/seed capital from ethically bankrupt sources left me unable to weather the quiet winter season, or to grow in the ways needed to be sustainable longer-term,” the statement goes on to say.
Find me a better sentence. You can’t. It can’t be done.
Blaming a lack of generational wealth for his failure is just…chef’s kiss. And calling people who refused to give you an investment for your hair-brained idea that was obviously going to flop due to, I don’t know, every single law of basic economics and human nature, “ethically bankrupt”? I’m sorry, I can’t read it with a straight face.
As for Sims-Fewer, he promises to be back with even more big-brained-business ideas in the near future and honestly, I can’t wait.
Personally, I’d pay money to watch a reality show where Sims-Fewer goes up against a first generation immigrant that barely speaks English wherein they both launch businesses and we see which ones succeed. And when he fails, he can explain to them that his lack of success is because he wasn’t born rich and couldn’t secure major investments.
Every time they do their best to implement communism, even on the smallest of scales, they add another brick to the arguments against it.
Capitalism, in the meantime, stays batting 1000.
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