The Tea Baroness Abdicates

Yesterday, Trent and I made the difficult decision to close the doors of our café, Cargo & James Tea, Halifax. I imagine that our decision comes as a surprise to some of you, and not at all to others. I also imagine that many of you feel that we should have told you personally, and you’re right, but I hope you’ll forgive us, knowing that we would rather not have to tell the story more than once. However, we are very grateful for all of your support, and we want to thank you for helping us out in so many ways: giving us the start-up money we needed, moving furniture and equipment, putting together a safe and giving us a stereo, coming all the way downtown to buy our tea and coffee and teapots and steepers, setting up our bank accounts and lines of credit, working for us for peanuts, sharing your artwork, your music and your poems, not kicking me out of the PhD program or Trent out of the sector council, handing out our coupons and telling your friends and families to stop by the café, coming by to chat with me at work, listening to us gripe, worry, gush, brag and confide in you, helping us navigate the mysteries of Simply Accounting, and not telling us we’re crazy when we told you we wanted to be business people. Thank you so much.

Although, in the last sixteen months or so, the store has been financially self-sustaining, it has just been too much for us to handle. Until very recently, we had hoped to sell the business, and were in negotiations with potential buyers as late as Friday, but when the last interested party backed out this weekend, we decided that it would not be responsible to incur another month’s expenses and stresses. In addition, we have yet to take home a paycheck or any dividends from the business, and after thirty-three months of working for free—and working some very, very long hours—we are feeling the strain. But while the business itself is kaput, Trent and I will be fine. If things go worse than we think they will, though, does anyone want to buy one very small dog? How about one slightly used Baroness tiara?

Although tea wasn’t quite the financial goldmine we had hoped it would be, we are glad that we made this venture. We learned so much, had so much fun, gained experience in business that we could never have had otherwise, and met so many extraordinary people in the process. We have thoroughly enjoyed the last two and a half years as Tea Baroness and Baron.

We plan to lay low for the next week or so—we haven’t seen all that much of each other lately, and it would be nice to see if we still remember how to sleep in—but we know we’ve neglected a lot of important relationships in the past few months, and we want to get in touch with so many of you very soon.

We are, of course, sad about our decision. We will miss our little tea empire, but we are also relieved and excited to focus on other things.