Lazy Cow Needs Your Help

My name is Lara and I run Lazy Cow Bakery, along with its associated mutual aid organization Casa del Xolo .

Some events from the past couple of weeks have set us back, and now we are trying to work ourselves out of a deficit, and to come out of it we urgently need community support!

December was a super tumultuous month for us, with holiday closures on top of ice on the roads that kept us from coming into work, we weren't able to make what we needed to cover our rent. And like most small businesses, we are living paycheck to paycheck, and even a couple of bad days are hard to recover from.

TW; sexual assault

Several weeks ago, I was drugged in an attempted sexual assault in Ballard and thankfully was able to get home safe, but as I have already survived sexual assault and physical assault, this event was very triggering for me. It led me into a dark place where I was barely able to work, and even then I only could take off one day due to the needs of the bakery. I have felt a lot of guilt over this -- this was supposed to be a time that I should be working overtime to try and get us over this hump, but my depression made it hard to even get out of bed. Even so, I still showed up and tried to stay open as much as possible, not taking off any time for the holidays.

Running a bakery is hard -- and running a vegan bakery is even harder. You may have heard of the "vegan tax", but it makes running vegan businesses more expensive than non-vegan businesses. Since plant-based butter, milk and creams are hard to find or need to be special ordered, they end up costing more for shipping, or distributors tack on an extra fee for the special order. The infrastructure is not setting vegan businesses up for success, but by existing and continuing to pressure wholesale distributors to carry more vegan products we can set a precedent for vegan businesses that come after us, and help advance veganism in general.

Another setback was that our distributor stopped selling our croissant butter altogether, and then through a lot of haggling were able to supply it for us. But we were out of butter for a full month, and since it is our bestseller our sales took another hit. As of today (1/7) we have it again and should from here on out, but we still need to recover from those lost sales.

We also pay our workers $20/hr plus tips with PTO and sick leave, which is much more than most places pay that are much wealthier than us. We don't want to compromise on this, as we believe paying people a living wage is fundamental to ethical business practices, and we don't want to succeed by compromising our values. Because we have full-time employees that depend on consistent hours as this is their only source of income, we can't exactly cut hours every time we get slow.

We have an article coming out soon with Real Change News , which highlights our mutual aid efforts. We have a community fridge and food pantry, and vegan community dinners every Wednesday, all of which have had incredible turnouts. We are steadily building a community of dedicated volunteers. It's hard to summarize all that we do in a soundbite, but just speaking personally, I have opened up my home twice to houseless people in our Fremont community, taking on the role of caregiver for an elderly autistic man that was sleeping outside the bakery. He was living with me until a bigoted neighbor reported me to my landlord, and they threatened eviction just two days after my assault.

Casa del Xolo has been a true group effort of heroic proportions, and we want to continue to be a radical space for change in the neighborhood. We hope to expand to further develop community-based housing initiatives in the coming year. We are working on developing free discussion+lecture series in March and April with topics such as Intro to Marxism, Neoliberalism 101, Forced Migration and Limitations of Mutual Aid.

Please consider supporting us and sharing this link, thank you so much to everyone who got us this far!

con amor, lara de la rosa