Almost six months ago, a group of mystery men showed up to the suburb of Ardmore to stand on the sidewalk in front of MilkBoy Coffee. The rotating cast of two to three men have been there every weekday morning ever since. They toss trash on the ground and rarely speak. The first big banner they held read: “Shame on MilkBoy Coffee.”

On the busy commercial strip of Lancaster Avenue, the vague, menacing statement reaches hundreds of people a day, suggesting that MilkBoy is up to something shady.

“We were mortified,” says Philly resident Jamie Lokoff, who co-owns MilkBoy Coffee with Ardmore resident Tommy Joyner.

Turns out, the men are representatives of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, Philly’s Carpenters union.

“This is an appeal to the general public,” reads the flier the men have been handing out. “Please do not patronize Milkboy Coffee. Tommy Joyner and Jamie Lokoff owners of Milkboy Coffee have engaged AM Painting and Mapo Builders to construct their new establishment at 1100 Chestnut Street in Center City, Philadelphia.”

It goes on to declare that AM Painting and Mapo Builders contribute to “the destruction of the area wage and benefit standards by paying its employees substantially less than those rates established by members of the Metropolitan Regional Council of Carpenters.”

“Have they forgotten who there [sic] patrons are? … Your refusal to enter These Coffee Shop’s [sic] in the Future sends an important message to these Contractors that they are not welcomed in our community.”

After establishing MilkBoy recording studio in 1994 (also in Ardmore), MilkBoy Coffee in 2006 and a smaller Bryn Mawr coffeeshop in 2007, Joyner and Lokoff plan to expand the MilkBoy brand into Philly with a new establishment at 11th and Chestnut. Scheduled to open late spring, it will be a two-story live-music venue complete with coffee and cocktail bars.

The project came about because the city offered the building owners, U3 Ventures, a loan to fit-out the building pending their finding a suitable tenant, who, in keeping with the city’s goal of revitalizing an oddly neglected and downtrodden strip of Chestnut Street, had to be approved by the city. Enter MilkBoy. As property owners, U3 Ventures handled hiring contractors, which includes a mix of union and nonunion workers—but not the carpenter’s union.

U3 Ventures did not return requests for comment, but Lokoff and Joyner say it was a practical decision. With rates generally estimated to be between two and three times the rate of equally capable nonunion shops, it’s simply cost-prohibitive to hire all-union workers.

“We were just trying to get it done with the budget we were given,” Lokoff says. “[We have] no input into hiring anyway.”

Now, with most of the construction complete, protesters continue to picket outside the construction site and the Ardmore coffeeshop.

“We were hoping it was going to go away,” says Joyner. “They made their point. [They] have a First Amendment right to make it, but they haven’t stopped making their point. Their goal is to hurt us, and they are hurting us. These guys think we’re millionaires.”

The point isn’t, as it says on the flier, to send a message to the subcontractors who already finished the work. The punitive message clearly targets MilkBoy and signals to other business entrepreneurs who may not already know: you conduct business in Philadelphia, you’re going to have to hire us—or else.

Royal Flush

It doesn’t take long fireside chats with local business owners and contractors to hear horror stories about the ramifications of hiring nonunion workers in Philadelphia: picketing campaigns that stretch endlessly through the seasons; physical intimidation; glue finding its way into door locks, electrical wiring neatly uninstalled just in time for opening day.

According to Joyner and Lokoff, an S-lock mysteriously appeared in a hinge, temporarily locking nonunion workers inside the construction site. (Ed Coryell, longtime business manager of the Brotherhood, did not respond to PW’s multiple requests for comment.

A local ex-contractor who requested to remain anonymous describes “a cat and mouse game” between nonunion and union workers that entails gaming the system by, for example, using variations on company names on building permits.

“[The unions] have people in City Hall just watching permits,” he says. “They’re supposed to be drumming up work but all they really do is hassle you and threaten you.”

Dealing with union aggression has become an occupational hazard of opening up a restaurant in Center City. Off the top, Brauhaus Schmitz, Marc Vetri’s Amis, Devil’s Alley, Smokin’ Betty’s and Barbuzzo are just a few recent examples of restaurants that drew protests for not hiring all union. Down in South Philly, the electrician’s union trotted out their 14-foot buck-toothed blow-up rat for Bistro la Minette.

Most of these are small-business enterprises. Stories get crazier as the jobs get bigger. Perhaps the most notorious one, the only-in-Philly parable told with the same tone as the old “Philly pelted Santa Claus with snowballs” trope (except this one’s true) went down in 2006 during construction of the Comcast Center.

In an effort to “green” the building and obtain LEED certification, architects incorporated waterless urinals. But the plumber’s union, Local 690, protested the plan—waterless urinals use less pipes, which means less work for plumbers.

The compromise? The Comcast Center installed the waterless toilets. But they also got a complete network of pipes that aren’t connected to anything “in case” the building wants to convert back to old-style toilets: a 975-foot tall monument to the power of union muscle in Philadelphia.

‘If we don’t laugh’

Joyner and Lokoff estimate that since the picketing began back in November, sales are down by about 5 percent—a big deal when profit margins are based on cups of coffee and sandwiches.

“We went through a slump with the recession, so the last two years were pretty dicey,” says Joyner. “We finally turned the corner and were trending upwards and we were like, thank god … Then the picketing started and business slowed back down when it should have been increasing.”

“There have been people that bought a cup of coffee and then gave it back and asked for their money back,” says Lokoff. “It’s crazy.”

Lokoff says an acquaintance wrote him an email to let him know that he had reservations about attending a MilkBoy event. Lokoff was asked for his “stance on unions.”

“I said I didn’t know I had a stance,” says Lokoff. “I was raised like everyone else that unions are good and certainly played an important role in our country’s history and how could you not be pro-union? And that was it.”

Locally, opposing perspectives have played out publicly on the Save Ardmore Coalition blog, where discussion about the protests at MilkBoy frequently evolve into pro- and anti-union political debate.

In real life face to face, people are uneasy talking about unions.

“Without knowing the details, I’m sure they both have a point,” says Harry of Harry’s Treasure and Collectibles, up the street from MilkBoy. “[MilkBoy] is a local business. I’m not going to say anything bad about a local business. And I’m not going to say anything bad about the union because I don’t want them in front of my store.”

Christine Vilardo, executive director of the Ardmore Initiative—the suburb’s equivalent of Center City District—says she doesn’t know the details either but she’s sure of one thing: The message that Lokoff, Joyner or MilkBoy is somehow bad for Ardmore is not only strangely irrelevant to the carpenter’s union supposed point, it’s absurdly incorrect.

“[The current banner that says] ‘MilkBoy hurts the community’ is really insulting,” says Vilardo. “They are so involved in the community in so many ways. They [participate in] First Friday, host activities for kids and families. They hire local people. They help brand and give our town an identity.”

Vilardo describes MilkBoy Coffee as an “anchor” in the revitalization of the downtown commercial strip of Lancaster Avenue.

“When people think about Ardmore, they think of MilkBoy, and MilkBoy worked to make that connection,” she says. “They’re one of the original cheerleaders for the town, and they remain that.”

Joyner’s email tagline is “sent from Ardmore, center of the universe.” Joyner is ex-president of the Ardmore Business Association and remains on the board. Lokoff is on the board of the Ardmore Initiative.

MilkBoy sells Ardmore hoodies.

But these days, Joyner is wearing a brand new shirt, hot off the presses. It reads: “Menace to Ardmore”—the message of the second-to-last protest banner in front of his shop.

“It’s one of those ‘if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry’ scenarios,” explains Joyner.

A few months back, Joyner and Lokoff had T-shirts screenprinted that said “Shame on MilkBoy” in response to the first banner. They hung a sign in the window advertising the shirts right above the union banner. All proceeds go to a fund set up for a neighborhood bartender who just underwent a kidney transplant. The union changed banners, and MilkBoy made new T-shirts.

“We’re trying to make light of it,” says Lokoff. “We’re trying to laugh.”

There’s little else to do: bannering is legal, and union protestors can send whatever message to whoever they want as long as they want. Ironically, the legal fees of seeking relief through the system are, like the cost of the job if it had been all-union, cost-prohibitive.

“Who’s going to stand up for us?” asks Lokoff.

If Lokoff were to open another business in Philadelphia in the future, would he consider pushing for all-union to avoid all of this?

“If I had the money,” he pauses. “Maybe."