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Caribou coffee shops: Who's the boss?
Caribou store managers say they were more like working stiffs and are suing the company for overtime pay.
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Nathan Nerland is one of 300 current and former Caribou store managers who say they were more barista than boss at the Minnesota-based chain of coffee shops.
That means they're entitled to overtime pay for all the extra hours they put in, they claim in a lawsuit they've been pursuing against the company since the spring of 2005.
Not so fast, says Caribou, which has grown from its first Twin Cities shop in 1992 to about 400 in 16 states and the District of Columbia. These people were bona fide managers, and therefore not entitled to the money, the company argues.
But that fundamental dispute went on hold Thursday in U.S. District Court in St. Paul, when the question before Judge Jeanne Graham was whether the lawsuit can continue as a class action or not.
The decision could send the case to trial as early as March, or open the possibility that each manager would have to pursue any claim individually.
Nerland, of Minneapolis, managed a Caribou coffee shop on Grand Avenue in St. Paul during part of his 2000-2004 tenure with the company, he said in an interview.
As a manager, he went on a set salary instead of an hourly rate of pay with overtime.
But he had no authority to make management decisions, Nerland said, including hiring, firing, promoting or setting employees' pay. And other than a weekly financial report to the corporation, "I was serving coffee, unloading orders, putting milk away, wiping tables and cleaning bathrooms.
"Really I was just a glorified hourly employee," he said.
Many managers averaged 55 hours a week, and at an hourly overtime rate of about $24, that comes to well over $10,000, said Jon Tostrud of Cuneo, Gilbert and Laduca in Los Angeles, a plaintiffs' attorney. They are also asking for interest and damage awards.
Nerland is one of three named plaintiffs for the group of current and former managers back to May 2002. Half of them are in Minnesota.
There's only one store manager at each site, and they are managers, said Joseph Sokolowski, of Fredrikson & Byron in Minneapolis, representing Caribou in court. They have "substantial" responsibilities and autonomy at their coffee shops, Sokolowski said.
Even while working behind the service counter, he said, their duties include training and supervising staff, as well as handling employee or customer complaints.
Together or apart?
To proceed as a collective action, the store managers' situations must be similar enough that the same arguments cover their issues.
That's not true of these managers, Sokolowski argued Thursday. There are enough differences in their particular circumstances that Caribou has a right to defend itself against each allegation in individual lawsuits and to examine "the credibility of each person's complaints," he said.
"Plaintiffs are not without a remedy," he said. "It's not the end of the road."
Plaintiffs' attorney Charles Nauen, of Lockridge Grindal Nauen in Minneapolis, countered that all the managers have reported that they spend more than 50 percent of their time in nonmanagement duties, and that the law says their circumstances must be similar, not identical.
Also, the collective action statute exists to "broadly" enable people with small, similar complaints a chance to pursue a claim they couldn't manage individually, Nauen said.
H.J. Cummins • 612-673-4671 • hcummins@startribune.com
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