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Philz founders serve their loyal workers a steaming cup of betrayal with notes of greed [1]
['Ellsworth Toohey']
Date: 2025-08-04
Remember when Philz Coffee was a converted liquor store in the Mission, serving up mint mojito coffee to hipsters who thought they were supporting a plucky local business? Well, the company that built its brand on "Better Days" just served its loyal employees a Grande cup of Go Screw Yourself.
According to Mission Local, Los Angeles private equity firm Freeman Spogli & Co. is buying Philz for $145 million, and guess what's not included in that hefty price tag? The common stock owned by employees who believed in the company enough to invest their own money. Those workers who watched the company grow from three stores to twenty, who smiled through endless mint-mojito orders, who bought into the whole "we're a family" schtick? Their stock options are being "canceled and extinguished for no consideration." That's corporate-speak for "sucks to be a poor!"
"I was expecting to at least gain something of it," one former employee, told Mission Local. She said she bought $12,000 of Philz stock. "I committed eight years of my life with them."
Freeman Spogli, whose portfolio includes such bastions of culinary excellence as Popeyes and Cinnabon, will now add Philz to its collection of corporate zombies. The Jaber family and board members are walking away with fat checks while former employees get to frame their worthless stock certificates as monuments to corporate betrayal.
Previously:
• San Francisco's Philz Coffee to Go National
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