He Told 70 Bikini Baristas to Pull Their Own Wages Out of the Till.
A Washington Judge Just Ordered Him to Pay Them $1,850,000 Back.
For years, Alan Tagle ran five bikini-barista espresso stands around the Puget Sound — most operating as “Beehive Espresso” — without issuing paychecks or paystubs. Workers say he told them to simply take their wages and tips out of the till themselves, then pressured them to hit sales quotas or lose their shifts.
On Aug. 28, 2026, King County Superior Court Judge Cindi Port signed findings of fact concluding Tagle and his company, Tagle & Partners, had violated Washington’s minimum wage, tip-theft, sick-leave, and anti-moonlighting laws — and that the violations were willful, not accidental.
The result: a preliminary award of more than $1,850,000 in back pay, doubled damages, and interest to 70 current and former baristas — one of the largest wage-theft judgments to come out of Washington’s bikini-barista industry, and, court records and reporting show, not the only Tagle family coffee-stand business currently facing a state accountability action.
- $1,850,000+ — the preliminary award to 70 baristas, per Judge Cindi Port's Aug. 28, 2026 findings of fact · Source: Schroeter Goldmark & Bender / AP
- 70 — current and former baristas covered by the certified class · Source: KOMO News
- 5 — espresso stands Alan Tagle operated in the Puget Sound area, mostly under the Beehive Espresso name · Source: KOMO News
- 17-day trial — the length of the class-action trial, held March–May 2026 · Source: Yahoo News (AP)
- 2x — the multiplier Judge Port applied to Tagle's wage-claim damages under Washington's willful-withholding law · Source: Schroeter Goldmark & Bender
The lawsuit, filed in 2024 by former barista Eilish Hoffman and certified as a class action in 2025, described a coffee-stand business built on the kind of bookkeeping gaps that make wage theft hard to prove and easy to hide. According to court filings and reporting, Tagle issued no regular paychecks or paystubs for several years and kept no reliable record of employees’ hours. Instead, baristas say, he instructed them to count out their own wages and tips directly from the register at the end of a shift — a system that put the burden of proving what they were owed entirely on the workers themselves.
On top of that, Tagle set sales minimums for each shift. Baristas who didn’t hit the quota, according to court findings, could lose hours or be fired outright — effectively forcing them to “rebate” wages and tips back to the business to keep their jobs. When two baristas were scheduled for the same shift, workers say, Tagle sometimes paid only one of them. And a companywide policy barred baristas from picking up shifts at competing stands, which plaintiffs’ attorneys argued was less about competition than control.
“Normally girls are not shared because it empowers them, they won't listen because they can just go to the other stand.”
Text message from Alan Tagle to another bikini-barista stand operator, cited in trial evidence
After a 17-day trial that ran from March to May 2026, Judge Port didn’t split the difference. Her Aug. 28, 2026 findings of fact concluded that Tagle and Tagle & Partners violated Washington’s minimum wage law, its tip-theft protections, its paid sick-leave mandate, and its anti-moonlighting statute — the law that bars employers from illegally restricting outside work. The court’s language was blunt: Tagle, the judge found, “accepted the benefit of baristas’ work without paying for it.”
Because the court found the violations were willful rather than the product of an honest mistake, Washington law required doubling the wage-claim damages — the statutory penalty meant to deter employers who withhold pay outright rather than shortchange it by accident. Lindsay Halm, the trial attorney for Schroeter Goldmark & Bender, put the underlying pattern plainly: an employer who fails to keep basic payroll records, doesn’t track hours, and pressures workers to meet sales targets “by any means necessary” isn’t making a mistake — it’s a design choice.
Bikini baristas who worked at Beehive Espresso stands in Washington won a years-long legal fight over wage theft and other workplace violations, with a judge ordering the business owner to pay more than $1.85 million in stolen wages & damages.
Plaintiffs’ counsel put the total preliminary award at more than $1,850,000 for the 70-member class — roughly $26,428 per barista on average, though individual awards will vary with how long each worked and how the underpayment hit their specific hours. Schroeter Goldmark & Bender and Working Washington Rights Center, formerly known as Fair Work Center, describe the total as combining doubled damages on the wage and tip-theft claims, additional damages on the sick-leave and anti-moonlighting claims, and prejudgment interest accrued over the life of the case. None of the reporting reviewed for this story broke the total into a precise, itemized dollar figure for back wages versus stolen tips versus statutory penalties — that detail was not made public by the court or the parties as of this writing.
It is also, by the parties’ own description, not the final number. Additional prejudgment interest and the plaintiffs’ attorneys’ fees still have to be calculated and entered before a final judgment closes the case — standard procedure in a wage-and-hour class action of this size, but a reminder that the headline figure could still move before Tagle is required to pay it. Niki Seligman of Fair Work Center said the case’s core problem for workers was simple: confusing, undocumented pay practices made it “difficult for individual baristas to challenge” what they were owed on their own, which is precisely why the case moved as a class action instead of 70 separate wage complaints.
Beehive Espresso is not the only bikini-barista chain in the Tagle family currently facing a state accountability action. Alan Tagle’s brother, Jonathan Tagle, operates a separate chain, Paradise Espresso, through his company Tagle Investments LLC, with stands in Tukwila, Monroe, Lynnwood, and Mountlake Terrace. On Sept. 18, 2025, Washington Attorney General Nick Brown (D)'s office filed a civil complaint in King County Superior Court alleging Jonathan Tagle subjected employees to sexual harassment spanning at least 12 years — including conditioning employment on sexual acts, unwanted touching, and retaliation against workers who refused — alongside separate claims of wage theft, withheld tips, and denied paid sick leave.
“Protecting worker rights is one of my top priorities as Attorney General,” Brown said in announcing the suit. “That includes making sure no one trying to earn a living is treated in such a demeaning and exploitative way.” The Paradise Espresso complaint remains a civil allegation; Jonathan Tagle has not been found liable, and no court has yet ruled on the claims against him. But the two cases together — one already reduced to a signed, $1,850,000-plus judgment against one brother, the other still pending against the other — point to a pattern regulators and plaintiffs’ attorneys say runs wider than a single business.
The owner of four “bikini barista” coffee stands in King and Snohomish counties is alleged to have violated multiple state laws by subjecting his employees to egregious sexual harassment, retaliation, and wage theft, according to a lawsuit filed by Attorney General Nick Brown.
None of this is the industry’s first brush with regulators. Back in 2012, KIRO 7 Consumer Investigators documented a nearly identical pattern at Baristas Coffee Company, whose owners eventually signed an $85,000 federal restitution settlement with the U.S. Department of Labor and paid roughly $5,000 more in back wages and fines to the Washington State Department of Labor & Industries after regulators found unpaid wages going back years. A restitution check to one of those workers reportedly went uncashed for months because the owners hadn’t signed it. Fourteen years later, the same underlying complaint — pay that depends on the worker to self-report, self-collect, or simply go without — is what a King County judge just found again, at a different company, on a much larger scale.
Alan Tagle — owner of Beehive Espresso / Tagle & Partners; found by King County Superior Court to have willfully violated Washington wage, tip, sick-leave, and anti-moonlighting laws.
Judge Cindi Port — King County Superior Court, signed the Aug. 28, 2026 findings of fact and conclusions of law.
Eilish Hoffman — former Beehive Espresso barista and named plaintiff who filed the 2024 class action.
Lindsay Halm & Andy Boes — trial attorneys, Schroeter Goldmark & Bender.
Niki Seligman & Janae Choquette — Working Washington Rights Center (formerly Fair Work Center), co-counsel for the baristas.
Jonathan Tagle — Alan Tagle’s brother; owner of Paradise Espresso / Tagle Investments LLC; named in a separate, pending civil complaint alleging sexual harassment and wage theft.
Nick Brown — Washington Attorney General; his office filed the Paradise Espresso complaint Sept. 18, 2025.
A judge found that for years, an employer told 70 workers to calculate and collect their own pay from an unmonitored cash drawer — then punished them financially for not hitting sales targets. Washington’s wage-theft law doubled the resulting damages precisely because the court found that arrangement wasn’t sloppy bookkeeping; it was the business model. The $1,850,000+ judgment against Alan Tagle is preliminary, with interest and fees still to be added. The civil case against his brother Jonathan Tagle’s separate chain is still pending and unproven. Neither closes out clean, but both now sit in the public record — not the till.
