Toward the end of 2024, a DOJ release floated across my desk: an individual in Seattle had been sentenced to 10 months in prison for failing to report as much as $6 million in income on his tax returns for 2016 through 2020.1 Upon closer reading, I discovered this individual owned coffee carts in Seattle. I know Seattle loves its coffee… the world loves Seattle’s coffee.2 But $6 million in income from coffee carts? The answer is yes, if they are bikini barista coffee carts, which these were.
Let us set aside the questionable (although apparently profitable) practice of selling coffee in a bikini in the winter in Seattle. The DOJ release also presents readers with a Helpful Comparison so we can wrap our pea brains around the magnitude of this fraud.
Not content to merely note that the coffee cart owner caused a tax loss of around $1.3 million, the prosecuting attorney offered that while the coffee cart owner had enriched himself from sales to his community, he felt “he did not need to pay his share of the costs that support that society. … For example, school lunches are provided by the United States Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service. But for this prosecution, [his] tax fraud would have cost the government the equivalent of 462,000 school lunches.”
Oh, now I get it. Dollars mean nothing to me, but undercooked pizza and tater tots? How dare he.
In case you are still unclear as to what this all means, here are more Helpful Comparisons, using a standard 10 × 8 school lunch tray:3
- To circle the world with school lunch trays, you would need approximately 250 million trays.
- You could fit approximately 300,000 school lunch trays in an acre if stacked perfectly without any space between them.
- If you were to stack up 850,000 Styrofoam lunch trays that New York City schools used to throw away daily, the stack would be 8.5 times taller than the Empire State Building.
- Stacked end-to-end, it would take 2,178.5 school lunch trays to reach the height of the Emerald City’s CN Tower.
Which brings us back to Seattle, and bikini barista coffee carts, and a fraud worth the height of 212 CN Towers in school lunch trays. And he only got 10 months.
