Barista Tuition
This post is part of our Work Symposium. An introduction to the symposium can be found here; all of the posts written for the symposium can be found here.
Monday night, the Chairman of Starbucks went on The Daily Show to publicize the company’s new college tuition benefit. Assuming that the philosophical reasons he offered for explaining why the benefit is being offered aren’t just total BS, it’s at least congruent with the notion of a relationship-based rather than contract-based conception of employer and employee that I wrote of in my primary contribution to our symposium.
If it really is, hey, we want what’s good for our employees because that’s part of what shareholder value is, then that’s exactly the sort of thing I was talking about. A step in the right direction by Starbucks. Deserves applause.
Too bad they burn their beans. Otherwise, I’d go get a grande double vanilla latte to register my approval. Alsotoo, props to Arizona State University. I suspect it will be an all-around long-run win: lower turnover and higher morale for Starbucks, a solid student base for ASU’s online program, better-educated workers. For the consumers? What the hell, it’s already a four dollar coffee, what’s an extra quarter?
Burt Likko is the pseudonym of an attorney in Southern California. His interests include Constitutional law with a special interest in law relating to the concept of separation of church and state, cooking, good wine, and bad science fiction movies. Follow his sporadic Tweets at @burtlikko, and his Flipboard at Burt Likko.
I was going to be skeptical and point out that while Starbucks’ decision is potentially “congruent” with what you had written, it’s not really inconsistent with a contractual view of the employer-employee relationship. I do believe that, but I also admit that I’m not quite sure, largely because I think I still don’t understand your point from that other OP.
In one of your answers to me in that thread, you made a really good (in my opinion) metaphor of a constellation: the stars are still there, but it’s how you draw the lines through them, so that “contract-based” is one way to draw those lines, and “relationship-based” is another. So, granted the tuition program that’s not merely PR-driven BS, how do those stars connect differently for a contract-based and relationship-based approach? I assume you might argue that it’s easier in that case to draw the line in a relationship-based direction, the line being in that case more elegant than the contract-based direction, especially if examples like Starbucks are not outliers.Report
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Think of it this way: do you, personally, benefit from giving your wife a nice piece of jewelry? If so, the benefit that accrues to you is intangible. What benefit does Starbucks get out of this transaction? More baristas? Better baristas? The answer seems to be “Happier baristas.” How does this help Starbucks’ bottom line? Lower turnover, of course, although turnover has never really been a problem for Starbucks. (In the interview, the Starbucks executive Bragg at Starbucks has the lowest rate of turnover amongst all the restaurants that compete at its level.)
When you give the nice gift to your spouse, the benefit to yourself is inherently the benefit to your spouse. The benefit to Starbucks is inherently the benefit to each employee. Having happier baristas means that the company is better off — end of analysis.Report
Oh, come on, now. Starbucks is benefitting from positive PR, People get to say “I go here and help out the poor English Majors of the world”.
You’ve got a much better case that Starbucks is looking for lower turnover in the Coffee Growing Market in General. (and they got it too, by raising prices).
http://www.amazon.com/Wrestling-Starbucks-Conscience-Capital-Cappuccino-ebook/dp/B001JAH7V0Report
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The coffee brewed in the store is ridiculously poorly roasted, but it does seem to have gotten better over time – I remember trying a coffee circa 1998 about which someone was very excited that it came from something called “Starbucks”, and it was basically charcoal water. Nowadays it’s identifiably coffee – bad coffee, but coffee.
For some reason though, they have some of the best instant I’ve had. Great if you’re trying to pack light for camping. The individual packets are a bit of an overpackaging issue, but I guess it’s nothing to those Keurig packs.Report
Instant coffee? From burnt-bean emporium Starbucks? I suppose next you’ll suggest that I get my wine from a box, or beer from an aluminum can.
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But wine from a box is how all the Europeans do it!
(discl: sample may be biased by knowing techies).Report
And then beer from a box and wine from an aluminum can!Report
So, about that.
Almost all the benefits come from ASU offering a discounted rate. The first two years, Starbucks pays nothing at all out of pocket; if federal student aid (Starbucks employees mostly being low-income, after all) don’t cover the reduced tuition, the student/employee is responsible for the difference (estimated to be about $1000 on average). Starbucks pays that difference for the junior and senior years (so, for those years, Starbucks is putting up the $1000.year). It’s not nothing, but the reality seems to be rather less grandiose than the rhetoric.Report