This might be long so apologies. So I work at the first Starbucks, the one in Pikes Market where it all started. Every day we have mass amounts of people in line to get into the store. It’s a huge tourist attraction, I get it, it’s like a pilgrimage for some people.
We had a decent size team of around 40 people so the hoard of people & drinks were manageable. However, due to how Starbucks has been treating our store and other stores, a lot of our baristas are moving/quitting/transferring elsewhere. I will explain in the next paragraph but currently we are around 32 baristas, 2 of which are managers (store and district), 4 are part-time & 2 are leaving for the summer & 2 are leaving permanently by September. With all those random numbers thrown around, our team is around 22 functioning baristas.
22 might not sound bad but when you have such a high volume of customers a day, it’s starts to become like the movie “300” where we, the baristas, are the Spartans & the workload is the Persians.
All of that aside, Starbucks continues to put our store through hell. They recently announced that our store & 2 others (1st and Pike & University) will be separating from the current district & creating our own district which will be named “Heritage District”. The idea is that our store is the “past”, 1st & Pike will be “present” & University will be the “future”. With this new district creation though, every person employed in the 3 aforementioned stores has to reapply for their jobs, which is just adding more weight on an already struggling team. A lot of our baristas are contemplating quitting/transferring for this reason.
The new Heritage Baristas will now be expected to have more responsibilities such as: Giving tours of the market, doing coffee tastings with customers, becoming a coffee master through the coffee master program & working at each of the 3 stores variably.
What I mean by that is that you as a barista will never be planted at one store, you will be forced to work at 1 of the 3 stores depending on the day. You might work here on Monday-Tuesday then work University on Wednesday-Friday ect.
Prior to the interviews, they never told us that we would be swapping in & out of stores like that. You get a 3%-5% raise depending on how long you’ve worked for the company, but at this point that raise isn’t even worth it whatsoever. It feels like Howard Shultz is saying “Oh you are drained, overworked & have to reapply for your jobs? Here dab your tears with a 5 dollar bill”.
Another big reason behind this I think is to prevent the spread of unions. Our stores are so close to unionizing but to prevent it from spreading to other districts they cut us off from the rest of the company. (1st & Pike went on strike yesterday & the day before that)
Before I worked at this store, I worked at a cafe & drive-thru store. While it wasn’t the best conditions there, we were still treated like valued employees. At the first store however, we are treated like robots that will do whatever our masters say.
The only reason I am still working for Starbucks is for college. It sucks that Starbucks has fallen so far. I am contemplating just paying for college out of pocket & looking for work elsewhere
This is not the Starbucks I fell in love with. This is a company filled with greed & hatred towards unionization.