Charmington's

We occupy a corner space in an old tin box factory in Baltimore City, and were just as refined as the setting suggests. Give us lemons (and ginger and honey) and well make our famous immunitea. Give us indecently low statewide wages and lack of paid leave, and well campaign for change until literal Barack Obama wants to come to lunch. Give us the G... reat Recession in 2008 and a store that has to close, and well move uptown and start Charmingtons with whatever staff and gear we can salvageor thats what we did one time, anyway. We opened Charmingtons as a worker-owned co-op in the fall of 2010. Running the shop took more staffing than the original group of worker-owners could provide, so we hired non-owner staff. Some of the staff joined the collective as partners (one of us! one of us!) and some of the partners moved on to other projects or other cities. Lots of our valued staff want to work in the cafe, but they dont want to, like, be the cafe, and we get that. Right now, Dan Scott, Cara Dudzic, and Amanda Rothschild are the active worker-owners who live and die by coffee, lunch, and catering. We do our best to keep wages OK and labor practices as equitable and ethical as we can, including providing paid leave and the option of health insurance to all full-time and part-time workers who have stuck with us past their 90 day probation. Weve built our reputation on sourcing good quality ingredients and striking a balance between having the best of the best of everything and keeping a price point that wont chase our neighbors away.Read More