Baristas steamed at Ted Cruz depiction as pothead slackers eager for handouts

Jacqueline Farias has spent the last five years as a barista at Merit Coffee in Highland Park while working her way through Texas Woman’s University. It’s not unusual for 400 customers to pass through during a shift. That’s a lot of pouring, sweeping and wiping. Her psychology degree helps her cope with “adults throwing tantrums” but hasn’t opened doors to a job yet. So she didn’t take kindly to being stereotyped by Sen. Ted Cruz as a lazy pothead whose vote could be bought by erasing some of her $53,000 in student loans. “If you are that slacker barista who wasted seven years in college studying completely useless things, now has loans and can’t get a job, Joe Biden just gave you 20 grand. Like, holy cow, 20 grand,” Cruz said on his podcast, adding that “if you can get off the bong for a minute and go down to the voting station — or just send in your mail-in ballot that Democrats have helpfully sent you — it could drive up turnout.”

To say that Cruz’s comments caught the attention of baristas nationwide would be a demitasse of understatement. They’re boiling mad. Steamed like a frothy mug of milk. “I would love to see him clock in for a shift that I work on the weekends,” said Farias, 24. The minimum wage in Texas is $7.25 an hour. The average barista wage in Texas, according to Ziprecruiter, is $10.54, which works out to $22,000 a year full-time. Biden announced last week that the federal government will forgive $10,000 to $20,000 in student loans for borrowers with annual income up to $125,000. Cruz is onto something when he depicts that as a windfall big enough to win the affection of recipients. Where he’s dead wrong, say baristas, is in disparaging them as slackers. He’s “so disconnected from us and the people and his community,” said Hayley Tepecik, 22, who wakes up every day before 4 a.m. as a shift lead at Foxtrot, an Uptown café. It’s a full-time job that she juggles with studying rehabilitation as a University of North Texas senior.