Ashley Holder, 24, didn’t have too much time for my questions at the Java Junction bikini coffee cart on Old Seward on Thursday morning. Customers were backed up and she had a four-shot vanilla latte and a mocha with raspberry going at the same time. She wore a pair of jeans and a pink, animal-print string bikini top. I watched her slide the window open. According to my phone, it was nine below zero.
The men idling outside were like most of her customers. Good-natured middle-aged guys in their dualies or their work vans, wearing custom-embroidered Carhartt coveralls and fluorescent green safety vests. They understood the rules of engagement between men in cars and partially clad women in coffee carts: Tip well but not so well as to imply something untoward is going on ($10 is fine; $100 is not), go easy on the pickup lines, don’t gawk, don’t sneak phone pictures.
I ended up at Java Junction on the suggestion of a reader. Otherwise, I never would have known it existed. Bikini coffee has created a stir in other towns but in Anchorage, nobody’s gotten too bent out of shape. Women have been serving coffee in their bathing suit tops — they usually wear jeans or yoga pants on the bottom — at Java Junction since 2008. There’s at least one competing bikini coffee stand in town, Beans N’ Things, next to the Holiday gas station at Lake Otis and 68th.
Natasha Thompson, who is also a hairdresser, owns Java Junction. It is one of dozens of coffee carts that line the arteries between Midtown and Dimond. Cart owners in that part of town fight for every customer. A reputation for good-looking baristas in a part of town populated with warehouses and body shops is a weapon in many a coffee cart arsenal.
Thompson’s cart wasn’t doing very well in 2008, she told me. She was broke and ready to sell. Then she came across a story about bikini coffee in Seattle.
"What is it they say? Desperation breeds creativity," she said.
She started working the cart in her bikini. She went to bars and handed out fliers to pretty girls, she said. Soon she had a team. They stood outside the cart with signs. Business tripled in three months’ time. Every year business has improved, she said.
It was an obvious angle but I felt the need to ask Thompson whether she thought it was good for women in general to have her baristas showing skin. Why couldn’t they just get by on the strength of their coffee alone?
"Sex sells," she told me. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, she said. Look at Victoria’s Secret. Those models have confidence and so do her baristas. Her girls are forbidden from going on dates with customers, she said. There are no whipped cream shows like a person might find at a bikini coffee cart in Seattle. The bikini is just a uniform, she said. They’re just making coffee.
On a good day in the summer, one of her baristas could make $100 in tips in a five-hour shift. Putting money in a woman’s pocket is good for women in general, she said. And anyway, it’s swimwear, she said. (Unless it’s Lingerie Friday. Then it’s boy shorts and corsets.) Wasn’t it feminism, she asked, that said women could do anything?
"Women can be astronauts, women can be firemen, women can make coffee in bikinis," she said standing in the cart in her "Alaska Girls Kick Ass" shirt. "We can do anything we want."
Holder, the manager of Java Junction, has braces, an incandescent tan and is blessed with a kind of impossibly tiny frame that makes you wonder, when she turns sideways, how all of the necessary organs can fit in there. She was a cheerleader at Bartlett High School and UAA, where she took business classes for five years, she said. When I first came to the cart and asked about doing a story, she eyed me suspiciously and refused to give me Thompson’s number even when I pressed.
She grew up sheltered, she told me during a lull in business. Her family is Baptist and military. Her parents wouldn’t even let her ride a city bus, she said. When she first started at the cart she was timid, but she learned, Thompson said.
"You have to have a certain attitude working here," Holder said. "You can’t just be some soft, sweet girl. You have to give it back to ‘em."
She met Thompson at Run to the Sun tanning salon. She sometimes calls her "Mom," in part because she admires her and in part because Thompson can be blunt and sometimes that makes Holder cry, she said.
I asked Holder what her boyfriend thought about her job. She laughed. He doesn’t have a problem with it.
"He’s like, ‘Show me the money,’ " she said.
Holder is the master of the one-minute customer conversation that starts with a "How are you?" and ends with a "Have a great day!" But don’t think she isn’t keeping an eye on what’s going on behind her in the reflection on her shiny milk pitcher. She has helped convict two guys who thought it would be a good idea to order coffee with their junk out. It didn’t hurt the investigation that they also paid with credit cards, she said.
Customers ask her if she’s cold all the time. She always says no. The temperature in the cart stays around 80 degrees. Sometimes she might forget she is wearing a bikini, except when it’s really cold. Then opening that window bathes her in a frigid rush that raises goose bumps. The other thing that reminds her she’s wearing a bikini is when she can feel a customer just sitting there in his car, staring at her.
Holder has quit a couple times, she said, at least once citing the uniform as the reason. Her other full-time job was as a receptionist at a funeral home. That was all death and sadness, she said. It made her cry and think about her parents getting old. She quit and came back to the cart, where it’s warm and it smells like coffee and coconut belly balm. She can’t think of another job that she’d like better, she said. Everybody who comes to her window is happy just to see her standing there.
Julia O’Malley writes a regular column. Read her blog at adn.com/jomalley, find her on Facebook or get her Twitter updates at twitter.com/adn_jomalley.
