The first time Jennifer Duncan saw the video, she was stunned.
In the grainy, black-and-white footage, a woman reaches out the window of a coffee stand to hand a customer some change. Instead of taking the cash, he grabs her wrist—and then attempts to pull her out of the window, into his car, and slap what appears to be a zip tie on her. The woman fights back, yanking her arm out of his reach and slamming her window shut.
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Thwarted, the man drives off.
“What was his frickin’ plan? Really though, what was his plan? Because it’s gotta be hard to pull a grown woman out a window,” Duncan said. Then, she got serious. Like the woman in the video, Duncan is a bikini barista. And if she and her coworkers don’t take steps to stay safe, they could also find themselves facing down something similar.
“That’s why we have two girls working at our other stand,” she said. “It just makes you feel safer to have two girls working there.”
For the unfamiliar, bikini baristas are women—because they’re almost exclusively women—who wear sexy outfits and serve extra-expensive coffee from tiny drive-thru stands throughout the Pacific Northwest. Bikini baristas have been a common sight in the region for more than a decade, but they’re now opening up stands in states like California, Arizona, and Montana. They’ve also exploded on social media: The hashtag “bikini barista” and similar hashtags have been viewed nearly half a billion times on TikTok. One TikTok-famous bikini barista in Washington state recently claimed that she makes $700 to $800 in tips “on a good day.”
“I went to Seattle probably over a year ago and [saw what] they were doing around there,” said KC Johnson, who runs a bikini barista stand in Billings, Montana. He already ran a coffee shop, so he decided to start letting his baristas wear bikinis. Although he had seen the bikini baristas on TikTok, he had no idea that it would be so popular. The tips, he said, are now way better. “Without giving out actual numbers, I would say that they’re a lot more than a regular coffee shop.”
What a bikini barista wears depends enormously on the stand where she works. Sometimes, the baristas wear relatively chaste bikinis that reveal little more than your typical Hooters outfit. Other times, they wear skimpy costumes, lingerie, or even simply pasties and a thong. The more entrenched bikini barista culture is—as in places like Seattle—the more stands seem to be willing to have near-naked bikini baristas, especially as the competition for customers heats up. Now, as the baristas spread across the United States, both the communities they work in and the baristas themselves are reckoning with a question that could change the future of the entire industry: Are bikini baristas sex workers?
For the unfamiliar, bikini baristas are women—because they’re almost exclusively women—who wear sexy outfits and serve extra-expensive coffee from tiny drive-thru stands throughout the Pacific Northwest.
“I don’t necessarily think it’s sex work, but I wouldn’t be offended if someone to call it sex work,” said Serenity, a 20-year-old who’s worked at a bikini barista stand in Oregon since October. “That’s one I’ve definitely battled with, myself,” added Duncan, who works at a newly opened bikini barista stand in California. “I go to the beach in my bathing suit. So what’s the difference [with] me working in my bathing suit?”
Regardless of how they feel about it, the baristas are certainly stigmatized like sex workers; there’s a reason that many of the baristas who spoke to VICE News asked that their last names not be published. When Johnson opened his stand, one neighbor slammed it as “disrespectful to women.” (“It’s not for everybody. There’s certain restaurants in town, or even out of town, that aren’t for me,” said Johnson, who doesn’t allow baristas to wear thongs or anything see-through. “I simply just don’t go for them.”) And after a Washington state bikini barista stand owner was charged in 2014 with running a multimillion-dollar escorting ring out of her stands, a Seattle-area bikini barista named Eilish said that she started getting harassed by the police “constantly.”
“They would say they got a complaint, an anonymous complaint, and they would just show up and it’d be like four squad cars,” recalled Eilish, who has worked as a bikini barista for more than a decade. “Why do you all need to be here? It would just be weird. It just never felt like—I don’t know—never felt like they actually really cared. They would be like, ‘You’re wearing a G-string, we heard, and we need your ID. And also, I need all eight of my crew here with me to check this out.’”
Regardless of how they feel about it, the baristas are certainly stigmatized like sex workers.
Politicians have also tried to go to war against them. In 2015, activists in Spokane, the second-largest city in Washington, tried to essentially ban bikini baristas from the city after a city council member tried and failed to restrict them. Another Washington city spent years locked in a court battle over a dress code law that would have made the bikini baristas cover up so much that it would have defeated the entire point of the business.
Hillbilly Hotties, a chain of bikini barista stands, sued, arguing that their outfits constituted free speech that promoted “female empowerment, positive body image, freedom of choice, and personal and political viewpoints.” They won in late 2022.
Eilish has no problem identifying as a sex worker. Like many other bikini baristas, she operates an OnlyFans account whose following, she’s convinced, is fueled by the fact that takes photos of herself in the coffee stand.
“I would say it’s like the LaCroix of sex work,” Eilish said of working as a bikini barista. “If you’re going to be in the industry, you need to accept that you’re a part of it and not shun people that are doing different levels of it or try and hold yourself above them.”
Many of the bikini baristas who spoke to VICE News said that they felt generally safe around their customers and had glowing reviews of their bosses. Generally, bikini baristas said, their customers are lovely. Baristas are known for chatting up their customers, cultivating a rapport with regulars, and remembering details about their day.
“I think people honestly think we sit there and deal with the creepiest creeps in the world all day long, and that is very much not true. Most of the people I see are very normal, don’t even really want anything that explicit or anything,” Eilish said. “It’s generally pretty regular folks that are very respectful and kind.”
But the job can also be dangerous. Bikini baristas work in stands equipped with cameras, panic buttons, and windows that lock twice. In 2018, a customer climbed through a stand window in Washington and tried to rape the barista inside before she fought him off. The attempted kidnapping that Duncan saw video of took place in Washington in January. And last month, one Oregon bikini barista stand owner was charged with 26 sex-related crimes, after he allegedly tried to rape job applicants.
The baristas who spoke to VICE News also had stories of men who crossed the line. Caprice, who has worked as a bikini barista for more than a decade and now owns the Girls Next Door Espresso stand in Portland, Oregon, said she’ll “see a penis unexpectedly” at least once a shift. After one man started sending her gifts, Eilish said that she got a little “unsure”—so she had him buy her a gun and lessons on how to use it.
“One time, I was opening the coffee shop, and I was just doing my makeup in the mirror and I looked over and this guy had a ski mask on by the bushes and he was jacking off,” said Terri, who has been working as a bikini barista in Washington for the past 14 years. “That was just scary, because who does that at 4:30 in the morning, in an open street by the bushes?”
She grabbed her car keys and turned on her car alarm to scare the guy off. “People are pretty ballsy,” she said.
The baristas who spoke to VICE News also had stories of men who crossed the line. Caprice said she’ll “see a penis unexpectedly” at least once a shift.
People are rude and even violent towards servers of all kinds, not just bikini baristas. But it is impossible to separate out that garden-variety superiority complex from the moralistic judgment often directed at sex workers.
“We can get people that are pretty nasty towards us just [because of] the fact that we’re in a bikini. Because I’ve worked at a family-friendly stand, too,” Caprice said, using the bikini barista lingo for typical, clothed baristas. “And people were very rarely mean to the extent that they are at bikini stands.”
Serenity said her job has made her a bit more cautious around men. “Men are frightening. Men are scary. They’re large, they’re abrupt, they’re loud,” she said. “People think that we’re stupid. They’re just like, ‘Why aren’t we doing something else?’”
But, Serenity said, being a bikini barista has been empowering. The other baristas she works with have been welcoming and supportive; she simply feels good about herself and her body.
“When I first started, the girl that trained me said, ‘You’re in control and you have to remind yourself that you’re in control of the situation. If you don’t want to serve someone, you don’t have to serve them. If they’re being disrespectful, you can close the window and tell them never come back and like fuck off,’” Serenity recalled. “I always have to remind myself, ‘I don’t even have to speak to you if I don’t please.’”
No one can quite agree, exactly, why bikini baristas first originated in Seattle—a city that is decidedly chilly, rainy, and not exactly bikini-friendly for most of the year.
“Why on earth anyone decided to put it in the middle of the tippy-tippy-top of the United States where it’s freezing fucking cold? I don’t know,” one bikini barista remarked in a recent TikTok, as she appeared to be wearing a fishnet top and little else. “I understand Seattle is so coffee-crazy that we’re the only people who fetishize it, but why?”
“I always have to remind myself, ‘I don’t even have to speak to you if I don’t please.’”
The answer may be, paradoxically, that Washington state is unusually hostile to one of the most common and accepted homes of sex work in the United States: strip clubs.
It is illegal to buy alcohol at strip clubs in Washington, leading patrons to frequently arrive drunk from other establishments or to expect “extras” from dancers. “I hate to say this, but you attract more perverts,” one longtime dancer told local news outlet the Stranger in 2019. “You effectively cancel out the casual night-out-with-the-boys customers.”
Plus, because strip clubs are making their money from dancers, not booze, they often charge extremely high house fees for dancers. Katrina Kane, a bikini barista who has also worked as a dancer at strip clubs, said that strip clubs in Seattle usually charge between $100 to $160 per night to work. On top of that, dancers are usually expected to tip other club employees, like the DJ and bouncers. (Usually, strippers are not a club’s employees, but classified as independent contractors—a designation that left dancers largely unprotected during the pandemic and has resulted in some clubs trying to unionize.)
“The bullshit in terms of management and them having to essentially pay to work at the clubs and, on top of that, there being no liquor allowed creates an environment where it’s not very hospitable,” said Melodie Garcia, co-director of the sex work advocacy organization New Moon Fund. “So that creates this environment where there’s like a need for something similar but not that vibe, so something a little more playful, something a little more accessible.”
Social media has radically transformed the job and made it far more popular, bikini baristas agreed. Being willing to appear in bikinis or lingerie on social media is now just part of the job description. It can literally be a requirement: Caprice has her employees sign a contract promising to post every shift.
“Without social media, I feel like it would not be anywhere as popular as it is in,” said Caprice, who has roughly 70,000 followers on Instagram. “I don’t offer the job to anyone who has under 10K followers. And if they do have under 10K, I have to see potential for them getting 10K in a few months.”
Being willing to appear in bikinis or lingerie on social media is now just part of the job description.
It worked, too: One of her employees went from 800 followers on social media to having more than 10,000 followers in one month, just because she started posting photos of herself working in the coffee stand. “I’ve honestly thought about just renting out my stand for people to take pictures in,” Caprice said.
Not only is social media the best way for stands to advertise which baristas will be working that day, but baristas can bring in a little extra change online. Baristas often list their CashApps and Venmo handles or their Amazon wishlists on their profiles, so their customers can send them gifts; out-of-state customers will sometimes ask Terri for photos of her outfit, then send her a virtual tip for obliging.
“I’ve learned a lot about men since starting the job,” Duncan said. “I can say that for sure.”
