This employee has earned her stripes.
Eleven-year-old cat Georgie has been working diligently at Lower East Side vegan shoe store MooShoes for nearly a decade, according to store owner Erika Kubersky — who rescued the tabby from Big Apple streets and has since tasked her with greeting and lap-warming customers.
The rotund orange-and-white staffer also serves as the sole surviving feline from a newly expanded book documenting the lives of hardworking kitties around New York City.
“Shop Cats of New York” features dozens of cats like Georgie — now adopted into storefronts as mouse catchers, fluffy advertisements or in-house therapists — working at bookstores, pharmacies, record shops, art studios, vet centers and even fire stations.
“If a customer comes in, she’ll decide to lap-warm people,” Kubersky told The Post of Georgie’s daily responsibilities, adding neighbors will often stop inside just to say hello to the shoe store mascot.
When she’s not cuddling up to a customer, Georgie can often be found sitting on her pink “throne” by the cash register — filled with plush toys aplenty gifted from her fans, of which she touts more than 16,000 on TikTok alone.
Georgie’s nights spent alone inside the store is no cat-astrophe, Kubersky added, as “she gets so much attention during the days — my cats [at home] just see me for dinner and to sleep.”
Such is the argument for the newly revised “Shop Cats of New York,” in which author and cat blogger Tamar Arslanian argues that responsible shop cat ownership provides much-needed homes to felines with more social needs than traditional house pets.
“There’s a lot of rescues that will not adopt out to stores, but the shop cats get all this stimulation from other people,” Arslanian told The Post. “For me, the most eye-opening part of the project was going into it feeling a little bad for them, but then learning they have it better than my own home cats.”
Some shops, like The Compleat Sculptor in Chelsea, have a vet come to the location to regularly check on cats, like cross-eyed 9-year-old Ralphie.
“You have to have the right personality,” Compleat Sculptor owner Marc Fields said of shop cats, adding he found the “right fit” in bow-tied Ralphie, whose sole responsibility is affectionately welcoming scores of artists who enter the cavernous 27,000-square-foot warehouse.
“We move stone on pallets with machines, and he’s like, ‘What’s up, dude?’” Fields said of the unfazed gentleman.
Other shops, like Myers of Keswick, keep a “family calendar” of appointments for 4-year-old Grace, who is routinely employee of the month for hunting mice at the British goods store.
“She makes sure there are no visitors, that’s why we have an A [health rating],” owner Jennifer Pulidori said.
“To me, it’s such a unique and integral part of the city,” Arslanian said of shop cats — some of whom, like Grace and C.O. Bigelow’s now-deceased Allegra, have even earned their own merchandise.
“They’re everywhere, but not everyone notices them,” she added. “They’re a soft underbelly of the city. They just bring such warmth to each shop, they have their own fan base and they create their own little communities.
“In a weird way, it makes the city smaller.”
The book’s first edition, published in 2016, rocketed both Arslanian and photographer Andrew Marttila to fame among cat lovers, but quietly went out of print after the COVID-19 pandemic — and the pair decided to reinvigorate the quirky Big Apple-centric anthology last year. The new edition will hit the shelves Sept. 9.
“We had this interest to have it reprinted by another publishing house as-is, but as we started to go back pitching this idea, we decided to do a revised version — it would be kind of weird to put out of a book that’s just the history of shop cats of New York … since most of those cats [in the first edition] have since passed,” Martilla said.
The expansion was shot over a week-long period last year, Martilla said, and features 20 new shop cats (and more than two dozen from the first edition) showcasing their distinct personalities.
“My methods are grounded in patience and understanding and being calm: I go into the situation and I befriend the cats, first and foremost,” Martilla said.
“I let the cats be themselves. The best pictures of animals are when they’re comfortable — and most of the animals in New York are used to people being around all the time.”
Ratty, of Casey Rubber Stamps in the East Village, was Martilla’s favorite feline to photograph.
“As a photographer, I love this challenge of having to befriend this cat that might hate me,” Martilla said of the calico. “She loved on me, rubbed on me, but also swatted at me.”
“She’s friendly, just not affectionate,” owner John Casey told The Post, adding Ratty was originally rescued to catch mice — “except she doesn’t do it.”
“Her name was Floria or some stupid flowery name, and I said, ‘God no,’” Casey fondly recalled. “She’s a runt! I’m going to give her a runt name: I call her Ratty the Catty.”
Ratty now greets passers-by daily from her window perch, from dog walkers to schoolchildren. Casey, meanwhile, is working on a custom stamp in Ratty’s likeness for her local fans.
“It’s a really cool, fun thing to go to New York City or live in New York City and befriend all the cats,” Martilla added.
“Maybe not everyone has space in their apartment, but you can visit a shop down the street — and [those cats] always have a multitude of friends.”
The post Meet the NYC shop cat working for over a decade — one of dozens of feline workers profiled in new book appeared first on New York Post.
