fiddlehead fern

me: i promise i'll be regular

friend: okay as long as you promise

Right, so the thing nobody outside the Puget Sound ever gets about bikini baristas is that the bikini is not actually where the story starts — the story starts with the specific building, the seventy-square-foot prefabricated cedar-shingled drive-thru shack on the corner of a gas station forecourt or the dead wedge of a mini-mall parking lot, which is itself a specific regional invention that predates the bikini by about ten years and exists because of a regulatory arbitrage between food-service licensing and retail real estate that the rest of the country has mostly never figured out how to exploit.

A real coffee shop with interior seating — the thing you think of when you think of a coffee shop, the Starbucks or the Café Vita or the Victrola — is a restaurant, regulatorily, with all the capital requirements that entails: bathrooms for customers under health code, ADA-compliant access, fire egress on two sides, HVAC, parking minima under local zoning, ideally a real commercial kitchen ventilation hood, a grease interceptor if you're doing any food. You're looking at a buildout in the six figures minimum and a lease on a 1,500 square-foot storefront at retail rents.

The drive-thru espresso stand — Seattle invented the form in the late 80s and early 90s — is none of those things. It's a shed. It has one employee. The employee has a hand sink and a cash drawer. There is no public interior. No bathroom is required for customers because there are no customers inside the building. ADA doesn't apply the way it applies to a storefront because the transaction happens at the car. Zoning doesn't care that much because the footprint is too small to count against anything.

You can put one of these things on a parcel of land so small and so awkwardly shaped that no other commercial use would even consider it — a twelve-by-twelve square of a shared gas station lot, the gore between two driveway cuts, the leftover piece when a subdivision fails to close. The regulatory class of the drive-thru espresso stand is approximately the same as a hot dog cart, and this is the substrate on top of which everything else sits.

Now stack this on top of the fact that by about 1995 Seattle had — because of a twenty-year head start that basically nobody else in America had on real espresso drinking — the country's first population of mass-market espresso-habituated morning commuters. The history here is worth getting right, because people think Starbucks invented Seattle coffee culture and it's actually the other way around.

Starbucks was founded in 1971 as a bean roaster at Pike Place. It was not an espresso bar. The espresso bar in Seattle was Café Allegro, founded 1975 in the U District, which did the actual work of developing what became the "Starbucks dark roast" in collaboration with Starbucks's early roasters — Starbucks at that point was selling Allegro their roasted beans as a wholesale account.

You had a decade-plus of steady growth in actual Italian-style espresso consumption by Seattle baristi and their customers before the format got scaled into malls, and by the time Starbucks went public in 1992 and the national chain expansion began, the Seattle local market was already saturated and looking for differentiation. Uptown Espresso 1984. Vivace 1988. Bauhaus 1993. Caffe Vita 1995. This is an absurd density of genuine third-wave coffee businesses in one metro, twenty years before "third wave" was a phrase anyone had agreed on.

The specific thing the drive-thru stand does that Starbucks can't do is catch the 4:30am shift worker. Seattle and Tacoma in the mid-90s were a manufacturing and military town — Boeing in Everett and Renton running around the clock, Paccar trucks in Kirkland, the Bremerton naval shipyard, the Tacoma port, the Fort Lewis base, Weyerhaeuser timber operations in the surrounding counties, and later the Microsoft and Amazon tech workforces with their own weird shift patterns and very long commutes because of the geography.

Puget Sound is a water-shaped metro: every commute is bottlenecked through a small number of bridges and highway corridors, which means your drive from Auburn to Everett takes two hours on a bad day and you want coffee on the way. Starbucks in 1995 is a sit-down café concept, occasionally with a tiny drive-through bolted on late in the franchise process, and it doesn't open until 5 or 6am. The 4am Boeing guy pulling out of Puyallup cannot use a Starbucks. He needs a drive-thru stand on his route that opens at 3:30.

The specific economic opening for the drive-thru espresso format is that gap — the blue-collar Pacific Northwest commuter with twenty years of cultural exposure to real espresso who needs that espresso before civilization has opened for the day. The stand serves him. The stand exists for him.

Which gets us to the bikini, finally, which is a product of the small-footprint stand's product differentiation problem. Once the drive-thru stand format proliferates — and it proliferates hard through the mid-to-late 90s, Dutch Bros gets founded 1992 in Grants Pass down in Oregon, dozens of Puget Sound independents spring up — you've got the classic problem of a commodity retail category where every shack is selling identical espresso from a Rancilio or a La Marzocco, every shack is roughly the same footprint, every shack is pulling the same commuters off the same highway.

There are only so many ways to compete. You can compete on location (best highway off-ramp), you can compete on price (bad idea, margins are already thin), you can compete on speed (maybe), or you can compete on the barista. And the barista is a female person in her twenties — this has been true in the Puget Sound espresso industry since Allegro, who initially hired art students and actresses and poets, because the job pays OK for part-time hours and appeals to a specific demographic — so you already have a workforce that skews young and female, and the move from "our baristas are art students" to "our baristas are attractive" is a small move, and the move from "our baristas are attractive" to "our baristas are attractive and wearing tank tops because it's August in an un-airconditioned shed" is a smaller move, and the move from "our baristas are in tank tops" to "our baristas are in bikinis" is barely a move at all — which is roughly the sequence that happened at Cowgirls Espresso in Tukwila in summer 2003, when Lori Bowden's employees suggested a "Bikini Wednesday" promo because they were hot and the owner noticed sales spiked and the promo became the format.

The key piece of regulatory architecture here — and this is the part people consistently miss — is that Washington State and specifically the county-level zoning regimes in King and Pierce and Snohomish counties have a very specific legal line between "food service" and "erotic entertainment," with the former allowed on strip-mall commercial parcels next to schools and churches and whatever, and the latter subject to setback requirements that mean you have to be in industrial zones or specifically designated adult-use districts, miles from where the commuters actually drive.

The bikini is precisely calibrated to sit as far over toward the erotic end of the spectrum as you can go while remaining on the food-service side of the line. The pasties are the line. Full nudity is the line. Specific touching or sex acts are obviously the line. But a bikini that would be perfectly legal on any public beach in the state is demonstrably not "erotic entertainment" by any standard the county can defend in court, because if it were, the beach would be too.

Mason County tried to push back in 2008 — ruled that a particular stand called Espresso Gone Wild was operating as erotic entertainment and had to cover up or shut down — and the result was basically that Espresso Gone Wild's baristas started wearing bikinis instead of pasties, and that was the end of the legal question. The industry settled at the bikini specifically because the bikini is what you can wear without your entire commercial category collapsing into a zoning nightmare. This is a genuine regulatory equilibrium, worked out through about a decade of nuisance complaints and planning-commission meetings, and it is why a visitor from another state — who does not know about this equilibrium — sees the phenomenon and experiences it as bizarre and inexplicable, when in fact every element of it is fully determined by the specific legal and economic constraints of operating a marginal commercial food-service establishment in the Puget Sound.

(The climate inversion is doing a specific aesthetic job as part of this, by the way. A bikini in Phoenix or Tampa is unremarkable; a bikini in Federal Way in November, visible through the rain on your windshield at 5am, is a kind of surreal commercial spectacle that the business is absolutely leveraging. The cold makes the bikini legible as a commercial signal in a way warm weather would not. You are being sold the fact that it is 43 degrees and raining and she is in a bikini, which is why you want to roll your window down. This is not unlike why mid-century tiki bars worked in suburban Minnesota — the whole product was the climate inversion, the hibiscus and the thatched roof and the rum served in a ceramic moai in the middle of a snowstorm. Same thing with better coffee.)

Who's actually buying? This is where the public imagination gets it very wrong. The customer base for a bikini espresso stand on a strip mall in Kent or Lynnwood or Federal Way is predominantly blue-collar commuters — the 5am plumber, the Boeing mechanic, the long-haul trucker rolling through, the construction foreman starting a job, the utility lineman on his way to a substation, the retired guy on his way to help his son put up a fence.

It is extremely not a pervy-old-men-in-raincoats customer base, and it is extremely not a strip-club-adjacent customer base, because the format doesn't support that — there's no dwell time, no privacy, no opportunity to do anything other than order coffee and pay for coffee and drive away with coffee. What you're buying, if you're a regular, is a two-minute pleasant interaction with a friendly young woman at the start of a long day on a job site, and the bikini is just signaling that the interaction will be pleasant rather than cold.

The drive-thru format enforces a specific kind of chastity on the whole transaction. You literally cannot get out of your car. The barista is behind a sliding window. The line of cars behind you is watching. The whole thing is about thirty seconds. If you are looking for something more than pleasant banter and a good latte you are at the wrong establishment, and everybody in the whole supply chain — baristas, owners, regulars, cops, zoning boards — knows this and wants it to stay this way.

This is why the format is regionally sticky and has failed most of its attempts to spread. LA tried it in 2009, failed in four months. A couple Arizona operators have gotten it to work in Phoenix and Scottsdale. There are scattered attempts in Texas and Florida. None of them have built the actual density that the Puget Sound has, because none of them have the substrate — the preexisting espresso culture, the blue-collar commuter base, the surface-parking exurban geography, the specific zoning equilibrium, the regulatory familiarity with small-footprint drive-thru food service. Outside the Pacific Northwest, a bikini espresso stand is a novelty you might visit once; inside the Pacific Northwest, it is a weekday-morning routine that an entire class of workers has built into their commute for twenty years. The industry has matured. There are national chains now — Bikini Beans out of Scottsdale, Boomtown Babes in Odessa — but the actual heartland remains a ninety-mile strip along I-5 from roughly Bellingham to Olympia, with genuine multi-location operators and a regulatory equilibrium that the rest of the country hasn't reproduced.

The useful comparison case is Dutch Bros, which is the biggest drive-thru coffee chain in the country, founded in 1992 in Grants Pass, Oregon, so basically the same moment in basically the same region on the same highway system, same small-footprint drive-thru stand format, and emphatically not a bikini concept — the Dutch Bros branding is evangelical-adjacent, youth-group cheer, a specific kind of Oregon-Christian-athlete sunny aggression that the company calls "broistas" and that reads as a deliberate anti-bikini positioning. The broistas wear branded T-shirts. The stands have elaborate windows painted with chalk slogans. The music is loud and the conversation is performative-friendly in a way that is absolutely not sexualized.

Dutch Bros is now publicly traded and has something like nine hundred locations across the West and is expanding east, and the bikini chains are regional and will probably stay regional, which should tell you that if you're trying to scale a drive-thru coffee concept nationally the bikini is actually a liability and not an asset, because the bikini locks you into Puget Sound's specific regulatory and customer environment. Dutch Bros figured out that the scalable version of the drive-thru stand was the one that could get permitted in Boise, in Sacramento, in Oklahoma City, in a strip mall next to a Chick-fil-A in the Dallas suburbs, and you cannot do that with bikinis. You can do it with evangelical broistas and pumpkin-spice Rebel energy drinks and a "giving back to the community" marketing program. The fact that both concepts emerged from the same regional substrate within a decade of each other is what you'd expect; the fact that one of them is a national juggernaut and the other one is an I-5 regional specialty is also what you'd expect, once you've noticed which constraints each one is solving for.

As for the baristas themselves — the economics from the inside are genuinely weird, and worth noting because it cuts against the standard assumption. A barista at a busy stand on a good morning shift can clear two to four hundred dollars in tips on top of a reasonable hourly wage, because the customers are mostly regulars, the regulars tip in cash, and the tip culture at these stands is one of the more aggressively supportive tipping cultures in American retail — guys will tip ten or twenty bucks on a four-dollar latte because the interaction is the thing they're actually paying for.

Aggregate that across a six-hour shift on a busy corner and you're looking at effective hourly rates that blow the doors off most food-service work, and which rival what women in the same age bracket are earning at the lower-tier dance clubs, with dramatically less physical and emotional friction. The job is hard — you're standing on maybe twelve square feet of rubber mat for hours, the espresso machine runs hot, the steam wand is loud, the winter cold coming through the slider window is relentless, the men range from perfectly nice to occasionally awful and you have no backup — but the money is real and the hours are not bad and the work is genuinely skilled coffee work.

The career arc is the same as most service-sector gigs oriented around young female labor: you do it for a few years, you age out or you move up (to shift lead, to manager, occasionally to opening your own stand), you transition to something else. Some women stay in it for a long time and do well. Some get out quick and want nothing more to do with it. A nontrivial fraction use the money as runway to start something — aesthetics practice, real estate license, nursing school — which is the standard use of high-tip-ratio female-labor jobs everywhere going back to cocktail waitressing and beyond.

There is a darker layer under all this, which it would be dishonest not to mention, and I don't want to belabor it because the kontextmaschine move of "and here's the actually exploited people" is a move I try to ration, but: the industry is split between genuinely operator-owned micro-businesses (often run by former baristas who've saved up, bought a shack, hired their friends) and more extractive operations where the owner is basically a labor contractor running a fleet of shacks, taking a cut of tips, charging baristas for costumes and shift rent, and where the barista-owner relationship gets ugly fast. A few of the ugly-end owners have been criminally prosecuted for sex crimes against their employees. This is a real thing.

The industry knows this, and the operator-owned end of the industry resents the extractive end fiercely, which is why you see branding around words like "safe" and "respectful" and "woman-owned" in the newer stands — it's a competitive signal to customers who know the difference and want to patronize the better operations. This is about where every labor-intensive marginal-regulation industry with a young female workforce ends up — the salon industry, the dance industry, the modeling industry, the massage industry, the personal-training industry — a mix of good operators and predators and a lot of women trying to figure out which is which before they take the job.

The temporal rhyme that keeps wanting to surface, which I'll land on and then stop, is the gas station of the 1940s through the early 70s, when gas-station competition was primarily on service quality and every chain was selling identical regulated-price gasoline from indistinguishable pumps. Standard Oil, Shell, Chevron, Texaco — they all looked the same, they all cost the same, the only differentiator was the full-service experience, and the experience was mediated by young attractive attendants who wore specific uniforms, pumped your gas, washed your windshield, checked your oil, and flirted professionally with the regulars while the transaction completed in about the same ninety seconds it takes to pour an espresso.

This was a whole branded commercial category. Esso Girls. Texaco Star Service. Phillips 66 attendants in the red-and-white uniforms. It was a minor but real sector of the American female service-labor economy for about thirty years. Then the 1973 oil crisis cracked the margins, self-service mandates and convenience-store economics killed the attendant position, and the entire category simply evaporated inside of fifteen years.

The women who would have been Esso Girls in 1965 found other work. The customers who would have flirted with them adjusted. Nobody even remembers that gas stations used to compete on the attractiveness of their attendants — it's a minor detail of mid-century American commercial life that's been completely forgotten outside a handful of old advertising posters and a certain kind of nostalgic illustration.