Pros
(1) Free bag of coffee or tea each week, free food item during shift, free drinks during shift. 30% discount when not working, or for other things not gotten for free. (2)Health insurance for only 20 hours per week (as opposed to most companies' 30 hours). (3) Will not cut hours to avoid giving benefits. (4) Flexible scheduling. (5) Some coworkers and managers are great!
Cons
(1) Extremely stressful. People think I'm joking when I say this. I frequently get things like "how stressful could it be just to sell coffee?" I made up my mind to simply ignore these people and tell them "go ahead and get a job there to prove me wrong, until then shut up!" (2) Stingy on hours. They won't purposely cut hours to avoid giving benefits, but to save money, they'll spread us out so thin that there's not enough people there to get all tasks done. This is especially burdensome on shift supervisors who will constantly get yelled at for not doing anything right because they didn't have the manpower and yet are expected to kill themselves getting everything done. (3) Extremely nasty and rude customers. Yes it's customer service, so you'll deal with that everywhere, but in all the places I've worked before and now after Starbucks, I'd have to say that starbucks customers are the absolute worst. Store managers and shift supervisors should have more leeway of dealing with this. Getting paid 10 dollars an hour isn't worth having a customer scream profanities and threats in your face only to get written up when you politely tell them to leave you alone. (4) Bureaucracy. Too much of it. Instead of doing what's right, they want us to do things their way. I've seen shift supervisors and even a store manager get fired because they insisted on doing what works, rather than what the company wants. (5) Low pay. Yeah it's like a dollar or 2 higher than minimum wage. But raises are rare, probably about a quarter a year, and becoming a shift supervisor will give you a 75 cent to 1 dollar raise, that's it. It's definitely not enough to compensate for the extreme stress we have to deal with on a daily basis. Even store managers make an average of 40k a year. Which is livable for 1 person, yeah, but for a whole family? Not a chance. Manager raises are rare too. My last manager was a manager for 10 years, and was only making 50K. All in all, I do not recommend. Get a job at Walmart or Burger King if you're looking fora way to start out. This company will hurt you. (No joke, since leaving Starbucks my blood pressure has returned to normal, and I'm 10x happier).