About that tip you left at Starbucks
I'll admit it - I like Starbucks. Not many of us righties do, mostly due to the reputation they have as a gathering place for liberals. I don't care. I like the coffee. That Starbucks is a lefty cultural phenomenon means little to me when I'm in the mood for an overly-roasted caffeine fix.
They used to have a really rich chocolate drink that TB really liked, but when they removed it from the menu she soured on Starbucks. So now I only go when I travel.
I almost always tip when I go - yes, the coffee is expensive, but that's hardly the fault of the baristas - they don't set the price. So naturally I was drawn to this headline yesterday:
Starbucks ordered to pay back tips
Could it be that the tip jars are emptied into Starbuck's coffers and the poor baristas are denied? No, it's even worse - the shift supervisor who slings venti drips and dry pastries right next to the lesser-paid baristas has been benefiting from the tip jar as well:
SAN DIEGO - A Superior Court judge on Thursday ordered Starbucks Corp. to pay its California baristas more than $100 million in back tips and interest that the coffee chain paid to shift supervisors.San Diego Superior Court Judge Patricia Cowett also issued an injunction that prevents Starbucks' shift supervisors from sharing in future tips, saying state law prohibits managers and supervisors from sharing in employee gratuities.
I might have a little sympathy if the supervisors sat in the back office browsing the web while the baristas slaved over a hot espresso machine, and maybe in some places they do. But the stores I usually frequent have a small staff. From the outside looking in, supervisors appear to be baristas with additional duties. If someone out there who works as Starbucks has a different perspective, please feel free to chime in. I'm by no means unpersuadable.
But we all tend to draw on personal experience when possible, so here's where I come from. While I was still active duty in the USAF, I had a string of second jobs. One was pizza delivery - a job where the employee expects that much of their income will be derived from tips. On nights when we were shorthanded on drivers (or just plain swamped), the shift supervisor (and sometimes the manager) would fire up their Corollas and deliver as well. I don't recall any of the regular drivers whining about lost tips or asking for a share, and I never heard the boss offering to forgo tips.
Now, I know that it might be a little different than having a communal tip jar, but isn't the underlying principle the same? The customer at Starbucks expects the folks serving the coffee to share the tips, if the supervisor is serving alongside the baristas, why should he/she be excluded from the spoils? Isn't it possible that some of the tips were intended to reward service provided by the supervisor?
"...state law prohibits managers and supervisors from sharing in employee gratuities." This one has me curious as well - if, during a rush, a supervisor waits tables in a restaurant, does he have to refuse tips (or give them away to the "employees")? Or does this only apply when there's a tip jar? I can understand the intent to prevent supervisors from skimming tips they didn't earn, but can't there be some circumstances where the supervisor is entitled to tips he/she has directly earned?
I expect that the real harm done to Starbucks won't be the $100 million award. It will be from the supervisors who will now warm a chair in the back room instead of helping out at the counter. Service will suffer, and the baristas may have fewer tips as a result.
Added thoughts: What are baristas paid, anyway? Do they get 8-9 bucks an hour, or a sub-minimum "waitress wage"? Are their hours held back to a small number in order to avoid the baggage of full-time employees? And all the same questions about the supervisors as well. Would the answers change my view? Maybe - although the argument for supervisors to be less involved at the counter still gets stonger as sympathy for the baristas' claim to tips increases.
Welcome InstaPundit readers! And thanks again, Glenn. Are shift supervisors entitled to tips or just greedy? Feel free to join the conversation!
Clarification: The story specifies shift supervisors, not managers. If anyone stops by who knows otherwise, please chime in. But I assume that a shift supervisor is as I've observed - someone who's job description includes barista plus some additional duties, like locking up and putting away the money, etc. And what do you think of this kind of thing outside of California, where there may not be laws as specific? Are communal tips an entitlement for the lowest paid workers regardless of who provides the tippable service? Should a company be able to set rules regarding tips? Join in!
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As I guy who delivered pizzas to make enough money to go to college, I think you've got some good questions. Oddly enough there aren't a lot of Starbucks near me, but there are good coffeeshops and I always tip.
When our deliveries got jammed up and a manager or someone had to make a couple of deliveries none of us regular drivers even bothered to ask if they even got tipped. I do know one thing. Some regular tippers were known to be tippers. I never saw or heard in 3 years of working there a manager or anyone else attempting to manipulate the deliveries to get a tip. It was a great place to work. Anyway, all the regular drivers knew that the best way to make a lot of tips was to make a lot of 'good' (i.e. fast) deliveries. If you made 40 deliveries you could pretty much count on making 60-100 bucks, and this was back in the 80s.
We got paid 50 or 75 cents per delivery, depending on which of two zones the delivery was in, $5 for gas and all the tips we could earn. I loved it. I really would like to know what 'barristas' get paid, and their hours, whether Starbucks or others.
Maybe it's a California thing. My son worked for them in the Chicago area and yes even about 7 years ago he was making 8-9 dollars an hour plus tips. They would divide up the tips at the end of the pay period and everyone made extra.
Huh? You lost me:
"I might have a little sympathy if the supervisors sat in the back office browsing the web while the baristas slaved over a hot espresso machine, and maybe in some places they do. But the stores I usually frequent have a small staff. From the outside looking in, supervisors appear to be baristas with additional duties."
Sympathy for whom? Given the court ruling for back tips that is the subject of your post, why "might [you] have a little sympathy" (for Starbucks, I assume) if the supervors were in fact louts?
Otherwise, the post reads like you do have "a little sympathy" for Starbucks and their supervisors because the supervisors do hustle brew.
Interesting remark about managers and tips --- I'm an Israeli who grew up in Europe, am now on corporate relocation in the Midwest.
Israel has a tipping tradition like the US (the going tipping rate is 12%) --- but there is an unwritten law that if the manager or owner serves you, you need not leave a tip. In fact, on at least two occasions, the managers of restaurants I was at told me explicitly not to tip since they were serving our party in person.
Of course, in Israel, the manager of a restaurant is usually the owner as well.
Sorry for not being clear - I meant sympathy for the baristas in the quote you used.
My position is actually more pro-barista than it may seem. In the end, this decision may harm the baristas more than it helps them.
That's a situation I've never seen here in the US. In my pizza driving experience, when the manager went out on deliveries he never refused tips. He didn't want to confuse the regular customers as they might not tip the regular driver the next time they ordered.
Small world. FWIW:
A number of years back I too was in the USAF and I too delivered pizzas to supplement the E-3 pay (Pizza Hut, Colorado Blvd, Denver).
If deliveries were slow but the dining area was busy all of us on shift, including the manager, were expected to jump in and help the waitress bring orders and bus tables.
But as far as I can remember none of us expected her to share her tips with us. I didn't share tips that I received while delivering and I'm sure the managers didn't expect any share either.
So I find it strange the Starbucks would expect their store managers deserve a portion of the tip jar.
Gun Trash, I don't think it's the managers at Starbucks - the story says "shift supervisors".
I would love to get a good job description as it's different from company to company. But in my "joe job" days long ago, a shift supervisor was the same as everyone else with a few additional duties, at a slightly higher hourly wage.
If that's the case with Starbucks, i.e. the shift supervisor's primary responsibility is to sling cappucino at the same tempo as the baristas (and don't forget to lock up and make out next week's schedule), then would that change your view?
I vacationed in New Zealand a few years back and was surprised to learn that tipping is generally not done expected or done there. I left tips anyway, me being an ugly American and all.
As a former "Ass Man", Assistant Manager 30 years ago, I made a premium of about 10% salary to make out schedules, fill in on short notice, etc. The tips were far more than 10% of our income, and no person ever, not even once, thought about not sharing those tips. This is one for "overlawered.com"
A fine example, in a nutshell, of how California law (and courts) discourage productivity and economic development. While the judge here might have stretched the law to suit his/her predispositions, you have captured the key point: Gov't regulation punishes a company that (appears)to permit 'serving' supervisors to participate in a tip pool, an incentive that one would think encourages good service, which in turn encourages return business and more tips, from which all benefit. If barring 'serving' shift supervisors from the tip pool survives appellate review, Starbucks, the barristas, the 'serving' shift supervisor, and future, less-well-served customers all suffer. Any wonder business flees California?
I never asked but I aiiways hoped that all of the workers shared the tips, including the shift supervisor. This is what we get for electing a bunch of Berkeley Democrats. Typical "consumer lawsuit". The employees will get $123.57 each and the lawyers will get millions. The employees will get a new paste wax for their car and the lawyers will get a new yacht. If I were Starbucks I would put a "Tort Lawyers Are Scum" sign over the tip jar for a week and donate the money to the local medical school.
What I haven't found in the coverage is whether the supervisors were treated as hourly employees or not. The Fair Labor and Standards Act differentiates between salaried supervisors, an exempt category, and hourly workers who are non-exempt. The Act may be supplemented and have higher standards within the States. There are things an employer can do with salaried employees that they can not do with non-exempt employees. If the company classified the supervisors as exempt and then took the allocation intended for non-exempt employees, I could see the courts directing such a finding.
There is a reason for this law, though. It's to prevent unscrupulous managers from requiring employees to share tips with them.
I work at a Starbucks in Arizona in the evenings. Baristas get 7.20 an hour at least at the start (I'm in it for the insurance while I'm at school). I think shifts only get a dollar or two more. Tips are usually around 1.50 an hour at my store, but some get more, and we share them. Our shift supervisors never sit in the back - they, as you said, are baristas with additional duties. Plus they have to stick around when people don't show up and cover extra hours. And most of them are the "coffee masters" with the black aprons and they do most things better and have all the information and the lingo and people appreciate them more and I'm sure most of our tips are due to them. Exclude them from the tips and they'd make less than I do.
...yes, the coffee is expensive, but that's hardly the fault of the baristas...
I may be in an anomalous area, but where I live and work Starbucks coffee costs about the same as everybody else's coffee. I'm talking about British Columbia and Washington State. The Canadian and American dollars are at par right now. Regular drip coffee prices at Starbucks range from $1.60 for a short to $1.98 for a grande, taxes included. This is right in line with the prices of coffee elsewhere. Coffee of any size cup is never less than $1.50, and the quality is usually worse than at Starbucks. Even gas station coffee is the same price, and the quality is usually much worse (with the exception of coffee at Chevron Canada stations, which is actually quite good but costs more than Starbucks -- $2.09 for the grande equivalent). I travel regularly to Washington State, where I worked for a few years, and the situation there is pretty much the same. The only difference is that there you can sometimes still get very very bad coffee for as little as $1.25. Starbucks might have been relatively expensive in the early years, but that's not the case today.
Thanks for the comment, Tony. Looks like the shifts got the shaft in CA yesterday.
You may be right, CJ. I haven't paid attention to prices in any other places lately. Maybe I should!
LB, I missed that distinction and under that scenario I would think that a shift leader would indeed deserve a share in the tips.
Thankfully, that part-time job at Pizza Hut was my only experience in the food service industry.
Occasionally I read starbucksgossip.com, where a lot of Starbucks employees and barristas post. A lot of the shifts were saying that if the plaintiff won the lawsuit, they would probably quit or go back to being a barrista, as they only make $1 more an hour than barristas, and without the tips, the extra work that comes with the job wouldn't be worth it. They are hourly employees, not salaried like the assistant managers and the store managers. They are a little bit angry at the guy who brought the lawsuit.
Tony, where in Az are you? I live in Bisbee and when I go up to Tucson I visit the Starbucks across from the Trader Joe's on E Grant.
I got promoted from a Starbucks Shift Supervisor to Assistant Manager and here's one of my main problems with this whole thing:
As a shift supervisor I was responsible for all barista duties as well as cash handeling. I spent very little time "Back of House" and was usually working on the floor helping customers. Because the vast majority of my time was spent on customer service, my reward for doing my job well (and for coaching others to also do their job well) was the tips I received every Monday.
Assistant Managers & Store Managers are responsible for all of the same barista & shift supervisor tasks as well as interviewing, hiring, firing, giving reviews, ordering products, scheduling, meeting budget, etc. etc. While the majority of our time is still spent on the floor (most stores are only budgeted 8-10 hours/week for managers to be "Back of House") we don't get any tips. That's because our rewards come in the form of a quarterly bonus instead of tips. Our bonus is based on the things that only we can be responsible for like meeting budget & turnover. And since bonuses are just a percent of your annual salary its foolish to think part time supervisors should be receiving bonuses instead of tips. And its also ridiculous to expect Starbucks to raise the hourly rate of supervisors when that extra something, whether its tips or bonuses, is based entirely on your performance and meant to motivate you to work harder and provide better service.
I hope Starbucks wins its appeal because this is just plain stupid!
Hi. Just to let you know, roasters over-roasting coffee beans are also burning off the caffeine that we all think we are getting more of... I know, I get a big buzz by drinking stronger coffee, too, but I guess its just psychological. Doesn't stop me from liking strong coffee, though.
Have a nice day.
Sharing would be sharing from a community pot, not accepting tips directly for waiting a table or delivering pizza.
This brings to mind another question: why do people tip at Starbucks? It isn't like a restaurant where the wait staff depends on tips for the greater part of their income, nor are we expected to "serve" individual customers much more than three minutes. We usually don't bring people their drinks, just call them out. Plus the customer is served by an average of two baristas every time they come through (which I guess happens at a restaurant too, but it's different). There are some things to be said about the Starbucks "experience" and whether that's worth tipping for but you end up wondering whether Starbucks as a company relies on the tips to create the difference from, for example, Dunkin Donuts. Otherwise they would have to pay their employees more themselves, in order to retain quality personnel.
In other words, you could argue the whole Starbucks idea is subsidized by instilling in the mind of the customer the assumption that they ought to tip where otherwise they would not. And the question is compounded when you think about the drive thru. Or about the fact that we have switched to automatic espresso machines. Also, if the tips are part of a responsible business plan, why isn't there a process for accepting tips on credit cards? Basically customers are penalized a dollar or two for paying cash. Unless you count the psychological joys of tipping. I tend to tip a lot. I read a lot of Hemingway. Makes me feel manly.
Maggie45 - I work in south Scottsdale, so not so close. You wouldn't like me as a barista anyway, I'm pretty grumpy.
What's going to happen is that any barista approached and offered a supervisor position is going to know that means no more tips. How much motivation is there to take a more stressful job that probably will wind up not paying any more than before? Sure there will be an increase in pay but will it offset the decrease from the tips?
I am a shift supervisor at a Starbucks here in Massachusetts, and, yes, we are as you described "baristas with additional duties."
In addition to all the joyous coffee-serving duties, the supervisor is more or less where the buck stops on a given shift. If anyone working my shift fails to do their job, or a mess is left for the next shift to come in, the manager is going to hold me responsible.
And, after a year in this position, by base pay is only a dollar more than that of a similarly tenured barista. So, if you took my tips away, I'd actually be making less.
Yeah, Tony, that's about 200 miles from Bisbee. Tucson is only about 110 or so.
Re: the tipping.... I kind of resent it. It's a topic that comes up a lot on starbucksgossip.com
Some of the baristas on that site go ballistic when a customer complains about being expected to tip. They talk about the training and the "Starbucks Experience". I personally don't think that experience is so great anymore, sorry to say. I wish Howard luck in turning things around.
Starbucks gets a bad rap on their coffee price; it has an undeserved reputation of being pricy because all anti-Starbucks detractors see is the $5.00 coffee drink, not the basic cup of joe. In my town, a venti costs $2.04, where a Dunkin' Donuts large is $2.15.
My experience with tipping at Starbucks is the more complicated the drink, the less likely that there will be a tip. I buy a venti and tip all the non-quarter change I get back, and I usually get a refill (which at Stabucks is 50 cents; try getting a refill at Dunkin' for less than full price) and they get duked the 43 cents change from the dollar.
It seems a lot of people here forget what TIP means. I'm buying future service with my tip. What it buys me is the occasional free coffee, many free refills, information on the freshness of a scone if I'm getting one, etc. One of the former baristas would keep the atmosphere peaceful by turning the music up to drive out the soccer moms with their rugrats when they reached a critical mass (he felt they never tipped, so they had no right to clog up the shop with their kids and excessive support infrastucture).
My experience has been that the shifts do all the same stuff as the baristas, in addition to taking care of the complaints of the oh-so-self-absorbed customers that make up a large percentage of Starbucks' customers.
Lastly, LB, up here in the People's Republic of Massachusetts, I consider it my job to be the loud, opinionated nutbag of a libertarian constantly berating the moonbats about their latest idiocies. I have a certain reputation for political discourse at my home Starbucks, recently enhanced by the fact that I told all the Obama Kool Aid drinkers to Google Rev. Wright 6 months ago. So pick up the slack, LB, and fight the good fight!
you missed the WHOLE problem here. Starbucks subsidized its supervisors pay with the tip income they receive which was I believe 1.71 per hour. Yes your generous tip went to pay the shift leaders pay.
Im a server and have no prob with the shift leader getting a tip cut. They basically are glorified barastas making from talking to current and former Starbuckers less than a dollar or two more than their underlings. But for a company charging nearly 50 bucks a gallon for a product netting them billions a year they can pay their employees wages in full themselves.
Now management getting a share of tips is a WHOLE different ball of wax. Servers generally underwrite the wages of fellow workers ie bussers, hostesses, and bartenders thru a concept called tip sharing.
Typically a server gives a percentage usually 2-4% to other coworkers who enable them to do their jobs directly. Management gets a salary and benefits that many times the service staff is denied. It is generally also illegal for managers to get ANY cut of the tip share funds.
Many times the support staff gets sub federal min wage pay. Its a shitty system but its the one that is here and it isnt going anywhere unless you want you dining out costs to go sky high.
I work at a Dunkin Donuts,and we employees have to give the porter(janitor) a buck or two each from our tips. Is this legal? He gets tips like this from another DD that he works at, and complained to our manager that he should get tips at our store, too. Not only does he not earn them, HE GETS PAID MORE PER HOUR THAN ANY OF US!
Can someone please clear this up for me?
I worked as a Shift Supervisor in Arizona while I was going through college. Starbucks was the most fun, and the most stressful place that I have worked. Like many people have said, shift supervisors were a barista plus extra duties. Actually I wasn't scheduled as a shift supervisor every day. About 50 percent of the time I was not supervising anyone and was cranking out the coffee like there was no tomorrow. The other 50 percent of the time I was supervising others as I was cranking out the coffee like there was no tomorrow. It is certainly a crash course in time management and multi-tasking.
I asked my manager why she wasn't able to get tips, too, because she was doing even more than me during business hours, plus back of the house work on her days off. She told me anyone that was exempt (salaried, or has to clock in and out) cannot have any of the tips.
Baristas made 7 something an hour up, as far as I understand, and I made 9.15 an hour (started high because I had a bachelors degree at this point) and stayed there the whole time at Starbucks.
I think it would be a disgrace not to include supervisors in the tip jar. They clock in and out, they are baristas and then some. Too bad, California.