Working at Starbucks was very different than what I thought it would be. I loved being a customer and thought it would be a good place to work. Heck, there are all kinds of sources that say Starbucks is like the best place to work ever! However, from my 3 years of experience, I have a very different picture. The first thing is that the turnover rate is very high despite many reports of employee loyalty. I would attribute this to the strategy of the company and how they cater to the customer but don't really care about the employees. I think there are a lot of attempts to get Starbucks to care about the employees on a local level, but it all gets lost in the overall corporate structure. Also, there are numerous attempts to improve job satisfaction, but the managers at the store don't follow through with what they are. Another thing is the customers can be ridiculous. First of, I could never figure out what was so inspiring about a cup of coffee other than some guy making billions of dollars off of it and then writing a book about it to make some more billion. So overall, this is my issue with working at Starbucks, the detachment between the employees at a local level and what the large corporation is doing as a whole. I guess I sort of felt like a storm trooper in darth vader's evil empire of coffee production as oppossed to the coffee jedi I wanted to be. In conclusion, I think Starbucks could do a lot more for for the great employees it has such as pay them more, give them a little more empowerment instead of over using them, and getting more creative with what makes workers happy.
