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Starbucks may have rolled out a new line of express stores meant to speed up your morning, but a lot of people still feel like the wait for their favorite frappucinos has been extra grueling lately. And, according to some baristas, the long lines spur from the coffee chain cutting back on employee work hours.
It seems like an odd paradox, given that the company reported record sales and profit last week, and got a lot of applause for finally changing its employee dress code to allow for more personal expression. CEO Howard Schulz also recently penned a powerful open letter to partners and store managers about how much he valued their service and wanted to make working at Starbucks better than ever.
And yet eight Starbucks employees from different cities around the country have told BuzzFeed that the "number of work hours assigned to stores by the chain's Global Labor Scheduling (GLS) system has fallen far below both what they need and what they normally receive." They also said that the labor cuts came without warning or explanation.
An online petition entitled "Starbucks, Lack of Labor Is Killing Morale" is campaigning against what it calls "some of the most extreme labor cuts in Starbucks history." Jaime Prater, who started the campaign, wrote that morale is the lowest that he's seen in his nine years of working at Starbucks due to understaffing. The petition, which was started in June, currently has over 15,000 signatures.
Starbucks has denied that there's been any company-wide policy change in labor strategy and said each store handles its hours on the basis of need. "We are not trying to reduce labor," said Starbucks spokesperson Jaime Riley. "We want our stores staffed in accordance with what they each need." Um, okay.
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