1. Because you haven’t been able to find a stable office job in more than four years and coffee shops are some of the only places you can afford to spend more than half an hour in without having to admit you can no longer keep up with your friends financially

2. Because your parents romanticized blue-collar labor and watching someone pull espresso shots is the closest you’ve ever come to visiting a factory

3. Because in this anxious world full of chaos and NAFTA and Panama Papers, there’s something hypnotic and soothing about watching someone confident and self-assured perform a series of discrete tasks efficiently and competently. At the end there is a product. Perhaps one day there will be unions again

4. Because you have yet to distinguish between unpredictable attention (the difference between how they act when they serve you your drink vs. how they act when they’re completely ignoring you after you sit down) and real love

5. Because everyone forgets how the service industry demands a very particular emotional performance from its employees when it comes to how their barista treats them

6. Because literally everyone is attracted to nice forearms and rolled-up sleeves

7. Because *extremely Kevin Spacey voice* we first begin to covet what we see every day

8. Because your life lacks direction and focus and you’re running out of alternatives to “going back to school” even though you don’t want to rack up even more debt and everything just makes sense here

9. Because they already know your name so that’s like one-third of a good relationship right there

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