“It is all self-declared, you don’t have to explain a thing. You just tell us what discount to apply, and we will apply the discount,” she explains.

The sliding scale makes Cafe Euphoria somewhat of an outlier, even in the socially progressive world of co-ops, Marraffino says.

“They’re asking their customers to have an experience of solidarity and not just to maximize their individual gain,” he explains. “They’re putting their social aims and their beliefs on their sleeve and hoping that the people reciprocate.”

So far, they have. Akera says 94% of customers are opting for the top of the sliding scale. It’s a reflection of growing consumer appetite for equitable business practices.

“If their model is radical, their timing is right,” says Marraffino. Often, he’ll point out that they are diverging from traditional work co-op practices, but it doesn’t seem to bother them much. “This is a different type of organization that is trying to break boundaries,” he says.

While Cafe Euphoria’s plans are ambitious, the staff’s experience so far also underlines some essential truths: The café has already been forced to make compromises and has hit more than a few road bumps trying to operate within its model.

Take one relatively simple piece of most businesses: running meetings. Without a traditional hierarchy in place, the Cafe Euphoria staff at first struggled to hold discussions that allowed everyone to contribute without the discussion descending into chaos.

“That is one of our challenges, because people can understand [a co-op] in principle, but to understand it in practice is very hard,” Akera says.

After a few iterations, they’ve found something that works: Each meeting starts with a brief general manager’s report, and then everyone suggests agenda items that are voted on and ranked, setting the course for the remainder of the meeting.

Cafe Euphoria, like many worker co-ops, also invests heavily in worker training. In trying to solve a labor problem—hiring and paying a historically excluded community, in the historically underpaid service industry—the café has a much different labor pool than its peers.

“We’re picking good people, but we don’t necessarily have all the skills,” says Akera. That applies to her as well: Akera has had a long career as an academic, and for the café’s early months continued to work full time as a professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she says she earned more than enough money to live a comfortable life. She retired from her academic post on June 30 to focus full time on the café, where her compensation will take the form of member equity instead of a wage, at least until the café is on stronger financial footing. “I’m a professor, I’ve never created a restaurant before. I’ve never managed a business before. So there’s a lot of figuring out that goes on.”