Starbucks Employees Petition Company To Stop Slashing Hours After Raising Wages

originally posted by: Krakatoa

originally posted by: Tardacus
a reply to: Krakatoa

you haven`t answered any of my questions, i have read every response to everyone of my posts and you haven`t answered any of my question. your childish business 101 questions are just your way of avoiding answering my real business questions,and that answers all my questions about you,i`m done here.

I'll take this personal attack as you not understanding my explanation of how investors diversify their portfolio to manage risk and maximize their probability of making a profit.

Leave it to an uninformed person to think knowing what a "cash cow" and a "lost leader" is a childish business idea. Have you EVER started or run a REAL business in your life. Form that response, it is a resounding NO.

Fer all ya business types, just so ya know, the term is LOSS LEADER and NOT "Lost Leader"!
(aka get people to come into the door with the promise of an item or service that is
below cost so they can be bait and switched over to a higher value-added item or service!)

EEEK!! It drives me BONKERS when I see stuff stated as badly as that!

a reply to: onequestion

Yes.

God forbid us actual hard working millennials (hate this term so much) that are lucky enough to be employed want to be paid for actually working.

We don't want to work for free. We want to actually make a living. This is something previous generations before us also wanted to do: make some sort of living. I guess it's some kind of element to survival or something that comes natural to humans.. but what would I know about being one of 7 billion other humans on earth.

a reply to: soekvg

I want you to make a good living too. Seriously. I just know everyone can't be at the top of the ladder at the same time.

You will never be financially stable working as a barista at Starbucks. It's unskilled labor. Learn a trade, earn a degree, start a business from a hobby, but do something real to make your life better.

Complaining is not real.

You are a special person with talents and abilities that can set you apart from the crowd. Don't ask me what they are; I don't know. I just know you have them. The trick is to use them.

TheRedneck

originally posted by: seasonal
a reply to: Phage

Just for fun, if the min wage was eliminated would you be OK with a 2.50$ an hour rate just because the company could fill the positions?

Who is gonna bust their ass 8 hrs a day, making coffee for $2.50 an hour?!

No one, that's who!

a reply to: TheRedneck

Thank you for taking time to reply to my post.

For the record, I am not a Starbucks employee, but I do work for nearly minimum wage and part-time hours. Perhaps I did sound a bit pompous saying we deserve a living from these places, which I know is impossible, but I really didn't mean it in reference to Starbucks or any other low-wage job.

I won't go into my personal life but in reference to what you said...I know I am capable of more and I have a college education, like millions of others trapped in retail. The problem with a lot of people is drive, personality, confidence - that's the real problem. I've been told my entire life that I am capable of more, by literally EVERYONE. Which leads me to another thing.... and this pisses me off: The same people who say millennials are self absorbed and not special are the ones telling them they're special and have their own unique talents. And they wonder why we're all sitting around wondering what the hell to do. This is not in reference to you..Not at ALL saying you do this, I'm just putting this out there because it came to mind while I was typing and thinking about what you said.

But anyway, I don't think it would kill some of these companies with disgusting excess profit to treat their employees a little better.

From time to time I read some career boards on other forums. Tonight I was reading about some people in India asking for career advice. The company was offering to pay them $150/month (far below average, average is more like 500 for this job) and came with a stipulation that is apparently quite common in India. Basically, the employee to be pays the company money up front, $2500 in this case and agrees to work for them for a minimum of 1.5 years. The $2500 goes towards the company expense of training the worker. If they stay the full term, they'll begin to be repaid the training money, if they stay double the term they get the training money back in full.

So $2500 up front, to make $5400 over 3 years, at which point your up front is returned. That's business as usual there, and if we don't start implementing actual labor protections over here, of which a sane minimum wage is one of them. In 20 years that's going to be us.

originally posted by: Krakatoa
a reply to: seasonal

Then a company will fail, and people will lose their jobs. Pick which is better...less pay or no pay.

Pretty simple math if you ask me.

Or ....

.. work for your poverty, or NOT work for your poverty.

Which would you choose?

a reply to: SomeDumbBroad

Doen't really have anything to do with the coffee. It is the stupid $15/hr "living wage" people. They think every store prints the money in the back room.

Want a "living wage"? Train in a "living skill" and stop flipping burgers.

a reply to: doobydoll

work for your poverty, or NOT work for your poverty.

Which would you choose?

Neither. I don't own any poverty, and don't want to. Why do you?

TheRedneck

a reply to: soekvg

First step taken: thinking about what was said.

Are you a 'millennial' or a person? 'Millennial' puts you in a class and makes you a nameless, faceless statistic. 'Person' means you are an individual with talents, skills, dreams, and goals. I think you're a person, but that's not important. What do YOU think?

Stop identifying with labels. Identify with who you can be.

TheRedneck

P.S.: I was labelled 'redneck' early in life as an insult. I refused to take it as such. Instead, I searched out the good qualities the label contained (hard worker, never give up, never quit, independent, ignore naysayers) and made a decision to make the label mine, not make me part of the label. It worked; few people who meet me don't change their connotation of the label afterwards. I define redneck; redneck does not define me.

Oops

a reply to: Aazadan

Heck if that is what the market is demanding, that should be fine.

a reply to: dismanrc

Everyone can't be an engineer, fireman, cop or a teacher. There aren't enough jobs. When manufacturing was gutted, the replacements have left a deficit that the service industry doesn't come close to filling. The US has a 12-14% manufacturing base now. Germany's manufacturing is 21% -23% of GDP. How do they manage to have the society they maintain and keep the well paying and (I hate to say trickle down) jobs that are associated with manufacturing?

Manufacturing jobs are the best way (until automation) to ensure people can afford a shot at the American dream.

www.asme.org... /manufacturing-processing/how-does-germany-do-it

Germany's economic strengths make it like the U.S. of yesteryear

articles.latimes.com... ny-middle-class-20120122

a reply to: StargateSG7

Thanks Mr. Grammar NAZI, that post adds so much to the conversation. Are you happy now that you corrected someone's spelling and not the argument? Please, enlighten us with your business savvy in here, some could use it. Or, continue to nitpick at spelling errors and add nothing.

a reply to: onequestion

From your source...in the second paragraph:

In the quarter that ended June 28, sales in Starbucks stores open at least a year climbed 7 percent, ...

What you're citing is the increase in revenue for the quarter, which is not the same thing as sales, and is not the same thing as profit.

If what you're implying is that every company should immediately throw their increases back into employees instead of R&D for coffee, opening new stores, training, marketing, etc., then it's apparent that you have a short-sighted view of how businesses should operate.

Let's look at a hypothetical using very basic math and very conservative (and round) numbers:

If Starbucks has 200,000 employees, and every employee works an average of 20 hours per week, you are looking at 4,000,000 labor hours per week. Per year, you're looking at 208,000,000 labor hours. Now, if they were to increase those wages on average by $0.30/hr, you are looking at a company that now has to shell out $62,400,000 more per year, and that can be a pretty big chunk of change that has a pretty dramatic impact on a company, even if that company has an 11.5% profit margin.

And keeping in spirit with that point, this is from your link as well:

Earlier this month, Starbucks announced price increases of 5 to 20 cents a serving on some of its coffee drinks, saying that a variety of its costs were increasing, like rent, marketing and labor. The effects of that decision, however, were not reflected in the financial report.

oh, and:

Scott Maw, chief financial officer of Starbucks, said the company’s acquisition of Starbucks Japan added more than $300 million to revenue in the quarter and helped increase operating profits.

All things like those examples affect relatively short-term numbers, like quarterly earnings and revenue increases. If you fail to take all of these things into account and just look at a percentage point of one part of the report and claim that it is evidence of a greedy corporation focused on money and not at all on their employees, you are failing to see the big picture--much like employees who scream for increased wages and then are shocked that their hours may get cut.

If a company cannot maintain a decent profit margin, it cannot grow, and certainly cannot grow as quickly as Starbucks has. They're not necessarily greedy as much as being smart with company money. But I guess there is a fine line between those when it is outsiders looking at only part of the information.

Don't forget about that massive cushion they must keep in case of lawsuits--at the end of FY2013, they had a litigation charge of $2.75 BILLION dollars, so there are always those issues as well for which a company must hold on to profits instead of just shelling them out immediately.

a reply to: SlapMonkey

Don't forget about that massive cushion they must keep in case of lawsuits--at the end of FY2013, they had a litigation charge of $2.75 BILLION dollars, so there are always those issues as well for which a company must hold on to profits instead of just shelling them out immediately.

Starbucks prematurely scrapped a contract with Kraft

Not too smart with company money...

a reply to: seasonal

Unless it would have cost even more to finish out the contract.

But I don't care about the details, just that litigation is yet another "rainy-day fund" that large corporations must keep on hand.

a reply to: SlapMonkey

Why would a company with vast marketing and name recognition get into a bad deal with Kraft that had a almost 3,000,000,000 down side? Again not too smart with the companies money.

Did the CEO keep his/her job? I asking, don't know.

a reply to: dismanrc

These kinds of posts always make me laugh. Do you honestly think that I city with 1100 / mo studio apartments can somehow support ANY burger flippers or baristas at all?

Where would they live? How would they get to work? What would they eat?

Or do you think that those jobs would go back to being highschool jobs and part time gigs for bored housewives / husbands looking to pad the Maui fund?

Because those days are gone. We lost millions of jobs due to globalization, and maybe that's just life. Maybe that's just the way it had to be. But NONE of those jobs were in the service sector, and every job we gained to replace the ones we lost were.

a reply to: seasonal

Even if they were, then what?

California, specifically, has a crisis going on right now where its cops and fire fighters can't afford to live in or even near the cities they are supposed to be protecting / serving.

College teachers, teaching BASIC classes are living in their cars because there are fewer and fewer FT jobs in college education at the entry level and most of the ones that exist are adjunct jobs which pay a flat rate amounting to about $1800 per semester / per class.