Thousands of unionized Starbucks workers will walk off their jobs on Thursday, with the one-day work stoppages coming to protest the company’s stance with shops that voted to organize, according to Starbucks Workers United.
The labor action is timed to for Starbucks’ Red Cup Day, an annual event in which the coffee giant hands out holiday-themed reusable cups. Starbucks has refused to negotiate in good faith over staffing and other issues that are particularly acute during promotions, according to the union.
“Starbucks is creating unnecessarily stressful working conditions by scheduling promotion after promotion without increasing staffing,” Neha Cremin, a Starbucks worker in Oklahoma City, said in a statement to CBS MoneyWatch. “Starbucks has made it clear that they won’t listen to workers, so we’re advocating for ourselves by going on strike.”
I would imagine economies of scale comes into it heavily. Smaller, independent cafes cannot get nearly the same low costs as huge corporations. They could easily be paying two, three times the price for supplies and don’t have the financial cushions to eat losses.
I’m glad I found someone who is knowledgeable about this.
How much does coffee supplies cost local cafes vs. big chains? Do you have exact figures?
Starbucks doesn’t publish their bulk prices for obvious reasons, unfortunately. You can find people making guesses online (such as this guy) but for instance he uses Costco bulk coffee prices to calculate and I highly doubt Starbucks is paying that much. Your average small independent cafe is going to be getting their supplies from generic wholesale stores and sites, where you can view prices for cups and things. Hell, I know some places that legit just buy their milk for their cafe at places like Aldi. So they’re paying consumer prices for milk versus the bulk discount a mega corp would get.
Edit for missing period which made an odd sentence.
Thanks for the useful information. I wonder if we can find how much Starbucks pays because they’re publicly traded and the amount of money they spent on product should be available to investors.
Their fillings are freely available on their website and will give you some insights, but they don’t get anywhere close to their unit price for coffee.
That said, their most recent 10-Q says things like
They do the same for other commodities. It would probably be difficult for a small scale player to participate effectively, if at all, in reading commodities to try to minimize commodity cost.
https://investor.starbucks.com/financial-data/sec-filings/default.aspx