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The group’s organizer said she wanted to professionalize fortune telling. Members of the National Association of Fortune Tellers were required to be “scientific predictors,” just as good at forecasting as Wall Street brokers. In 1936 an attempt was made to organize tea leaf readers but it didn’t seem to amount to much. A “gypsy princess” on site was an undeniable attraction - “Something New, Something Different,” according to an advertisement for Harlem’s Flamingo Grill and Tea Room on 7th Avenue. The raids did little to reduce their ranks and tea rooms continued to announce readings. In the 1930s police conducted raids of tea rooms advertising tea leaf readings. New York state passed a law in 1917 that made fortune telling in New York City illegal.

A Texas law of 1909 declared “all companies of Gypsies” who supported themselves by telling fortunes would be punished as vagrants.

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In fact, the reason that tea rooms advertised free readings was because many states and cities had laws prohibiting payment for fortune telling so as to keep genuine gypsies from settling there. Many tea leaf readers had names suggesting they were “real gypsies” but that is unlikely, despite the Madame Zitas, Estellas, and Levestas. A 1930 advertisement for the Mystic Tea Room, in Kansas City MO, asked “Have You Worries? Financial, domestic or otherwise? Our gifted readers will help you solve your problems.” Sometimes, though, an advertisement suggested that patrons’ reasons for having their tea leaves read were not so happy. Most customers, almost always women, saw the readings as light entertainment suitable for clubs and parties. Evidently after opening each one she sold it to a new owner.

Such decor was a formula worked out by a New York City woman who by 1930 had opened 25 such places all over the country. Gypsy tea rooms dressed waitresses in peasant costumes with bandana headdresses and adopted brilliant color schemes such as orange and black with yellow candles, and red tables and chairs. Times were hard, and Gypsy, Mystic, or Egyptian tea rooms, as they were known, offered a diversion from the concerns of the day and a way to prop up tottering businesses.

Los Angeles had a Gypsy Tea Room across the street from Bullock’s department store, while Omaha’s Gypsy Tea Shop, affiliated with another one in Council Bluffs IA, was across from the Brandeis store. Downtown shopping districts were popular places to attract customers, with about twenty near NYC stores located in the 30s between 6th and 7th Avenues. Gypsy tea rooms were often located on the second or third floor of a building, reducing the rent burden. A drug store in New Orleans reduced the menu to a toasted sandwich and tea for the low price of 15 cents. The menus in some of them consisted simply of a sandwich, piece of cake, and cup of tea, typically costing 50 cents. They represented a degree of degeneration of the tea room concept in that they built their allure on tea leaf reading as much as – or more than - food. Although “gypsy” tea rooms could be found in the 1920s, and occasionally even now, their heyday was in the 1930s Depression.