Dylan Alverson spent 15 years trying to make his Minneapolis restaurant work the traditional way. Last year, the cafe brought in $1.3 million in sales and still lost money. So in February, he tried something completely different: he took the prices off the menu.
Post Modern Times in South Minneapolis now operates on donations only. Walk in, order brunch, and pay whatever you’d like, including nothing at all. Between 40 and 50 percent of customers do exactly that.
And yet, Alverson told the New York Times he’s doing better now than he ever did running a conventional restaurant.
His staff agreed to work on a volunteer basis, supported by shared tips and community donations. Neighbors started showing up, not just to eat, but to support the idea that a place could exist where nobody gets turned away for lack of cash.
“What I realized was happening right away,” Alverson said, “is that we’d created a place of economic equality that doesn’t really exist in a business setting.”
He’s not claiming to have all the answers. He calls it a “creation period,” an ongoing experiment to see if there’s a model here that could work for other struggling independent restaurants.
Sometimes the math that looks impossible on paper works out just fine in practice.
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