Long answer: they cater to customers with a maid fetish. It is possible that some staff do not mind, or even enjoy, working there. It is possible that a maid cafe might put clear boundaries, and protect its staff. But in the real world, most of the time, yes it is quite degrading.
Local officials found that hundreds of cafés and e-sports venues in Yiwu were offering maid café-style services, with female servers forced to kneel to serve tea, massage male customers, and shout “Welcome home, my master!” to anyone entering.
The procuratorate brought a public interest lawsuit to a local court, arguing that such services “belittle and damage women’s rights to human dignity.” They also said that some local businesses had failed to take measures to protect their female staff from sexual harassment.
[...]
“Maid cafés have been a symbolic space where women are defaulted to being the subject of sexual exploitation,” Chen said. “The key to solving this problem should be educating the public to respect women.”
Sounds like banning this might not be such a bad thing? Stricter regulation and severe penalties for violators would maybe help instead, but I don't know enough about Chinese culture to really be able to comment on whether that would even be effective. At least taking steps to make sure this doesn't continue is a net benefit, I think.
I went to one like 17 years ago or so when it had first opened in my area, and it was basically just a subpar restaurant where the waitresses were wearing maid costumes. None of the shit you might see in an anime.
Not that they're the same, but this feels like not letting people be strippers because some people may feel degraded by it. I could understand having legislation that provides protections for employees through employer obligations to ensure a safe environment, but ultimately it's the choice of the individual if they're okay with the work or not. I don't have a dog in this fight, but this feels like Chinese conservatism forcing "modesty" on women.
Thank you for responding to my question! I edited my original comment because I took a quick look into it and came to the same conclusion you did. I'm of the opinion that things like sex work can be done properly, and if they aren't "officially" done properly they will be done improperly illegally. Sort of a "Prohibition" vs. "regulated alcohol sales" scenario. People like other sexy people, and some adults legitimately consent to be those other sexy people. However, in order for it to be ethical there have to be robust protections.
It doesn't take much research to find out these maid cafes do not always feature said protections. So I edited my original comment because I found the answer and then you kindly backed it up very shortly afterwards.
I see these sometimes in anime and they always seem creepy as hell. I just don't get it. Then again, I'm gay and dom/sub never has appealed to me, even in role play.
I think there has to be at least little more to this than that. There's some complicated implications taking this to logical extremes, what of the adult industry for example? But really, it's hardly a stretch to say the whole theme around which these cafes operate is degrading. Typically cafe work doesn't require a worker to behave or be encouraged to be objectified in this way and in a normal cafe context, most of the whole maid cafe schtick would be considered pretty inappropriate.