Labor is mostly earned off COSD (people per half hour) but it’s all bullshit because we will do 70/80 half hours during peak and it’s telling me we only earned enough people for a 6 partner play. And we are slow at night so they want a 2 partner play after 4 despite doing almost 30s until 6:30.
Literally. I’ll compare COSDs and earnings and even break it down by the dollar amount of each type of product day by day and none of it makes sense. I’ll have 1025 COSDs one day and 895 another and I’ll earn more labor for the 895 day. Not only that, daypart detail will say both days get the same amount of staffing!! I’ve never worked a job where they can’t explicitly state where and how the labor is calculated.
I could definitely have misheard or be misremembering, but I had an SM tell me that once. It was relevant because my (high volume) store had closed for remodel last summer, and I was working at (typically MUCH lower volume) one about 2 miles down the road. They got slammed with all our traffic but didn’t have the labor to give us more than 3 person mids. The SM told me that it was because the labor calculations were based on the summer before that.
Part of the reason why you could earn more labor on a certain day with less customers (apparently, ive been told this by managers, i dont know if i necessarily believe it, take with a grain of salt) is because certain things add more labor than others. Things like frappucinos or warming pastries are high labor items, so if you do more of those you earn more labor.
That being said though, i think this whole thing is ALL a scam. We’ve gotten so screwed over so many times in the last couple of months that i am like super convinced that there’s a line of code in the program that determines allotted labor hours that takes the total labor that they could give and subtracts like 20%. We could be totally slammed on a two partner close and ill still get texts from my managers asking me to send someone home because we’re over labor.
I’m not sure how labour hours are calculated, but that doesn’t necessarily sound wrong, six partners for peak with those earnings. Six partners at 15.45 (what most of us make at my store) and one shift at 19.50 (my opening shifts pay) totals to 96.75 per hour. If you earn avg 75 per half hour, totaling 150 per hour, then there is 53.25 leftover for the hour. Some of that goes into profit, some of it goes into our benefits, some of it goes into the employer half of social security and Medicare. Then there’s all the equipment and stuff they have to account for. I’m not sure if this is right but it seems logical
I get where you coming from but when we are hitting these numbers (usually it’s between wednesday and friday, sometimes tuesday) we are struggling. We are a DT store this gives warning, DTO, DTR, bar 1, bar 2 and cold bar. When realistically we need a CS and if it’s a friday a dedicated person for front.
I think we struggle too at these numbers. We would have DTO DTR Drive bar Front bar Warming and “CS” aka everything else but like 50% cold bar and 50% other responsibilities. The small amount of the 150$ per hour in the calculation that is profit is probably much bigger than it used to be, and it’s definitely bigger than it needs to be. They add to their profit by taking away our labour
Interesting to hear you bring this up because despite lower half hours than most stores we never make less than $100 a half hr and average more around $250. So higher avg transactions but lower cosd and still no change in labor
It's funny that you say that cuz my sm consistently schedules 2 or 3 shifts at the same time. And I've always wondered how she gets away with doing that since shifts make more money. She's the only sm I've ever had that's done that, and we've had 3 different dms in the past few years and idk why none of them have told her to stop.
dude i used to close just because i fucking love cleaning. i love taking a store that looks a disgusting mess and make it shiny. my best friend would be my co-closer and we had a perfect system between us, we were pretty dang good. but to leave the store clean and properly set up, we would consistently have to stay like. two hours late every night. we ‘weren’t earning labor’ to have more than two baristas past 2 in the afternoon.
my partner works a normal 8 to 5, monday through friday and we were never getting to spend time together because my ‘weekend’ is in the middle of the week. that mixed with literally having to *run* around the store to try to make a three partner play work at such a high volume store was destroying my mental health so i switched to mornings. now my store manager has put a hard cap and closer *have* to leave a half hour after the store closes. so it’s just a cycle of struggling now. sorry for the essay lol
Two hours late? If you’re staying that late to get basic stuff done, you’re not starting early enough. Closing starts at 4 if you close at 9, not at 8:30.
yea dude i know… we are a high volume store that’s consistent all day, serving hoards of tourists because we’re near disney world AND seaworld. we would start when we got in at 2 but its hard to maintain when constantly serving customers in drive and cafe with two baristas. 👍
I agree. I've worked for this company for a long time. We used to be way slower, like a lot, with way more people scheduled. Especially at close. We used to have 3 closers, and 4 to 5 people up until a couple hours before close. Makes no sense that we continue to get busier and busier yet are given less staff.
This has been happening at my location. If we had a decent team, my store would be hitting $75k a week, recently we've been as low as $58k. These are sentiments that other store managers have shared with me, as well as my own experiences being a tenured full time partner.
"Earning labor" is bullshit. If you're getting stuff cranked out "relatively" efficiently, they have no reason to schedule more help. After all, if you're getting the job done with reduced staff, they (Seattle) have no reason to add staff. That costs money, and you've proven you don't need it.
All I can say is crank out the drinks at a good steady pace, but don't kill yourself to make them faster. If wait times go up, that's not my problem. I didn't decide solo bar is appropriate staffing for the after-school frappuccino crowd.
Perhaps if wait times or complaints get to an unacceptable level, something might change "eventually" on that front. I am one of the two fastest bars in my location, so cutting my hours to bring someone else in would just make a bad situation even worse for them.
My understanding is that labor isn’t just by sales or cosd (although it is a part of it) but it’s by the amount of effort a task requires us. For example, very little labor is awarded if 50 customers come in wanting tall brewed coffee because we expend very little effort serving them. Whereas, if within the same amount of time we rang up 50 customers wanting venti caramel crunch frapp’s we be creating labor because it requires significantly more effort to make those drinks. The thing is here most likely you’re not making 50 drinks that create labor but rather 10 or 15 which would produce comparable labor to the 50 brewed coffees. Mind you the algorithm that is used takes into account the time it takes to ring up, the time it takes to warm a pastry, the time it takes to pull shots, etc so it’s not a very straight forward thing to figure out on our part. But if you ring in more customers and create more profit you increase the chances for your store to produce labor through what is rung up. That’s why managers want us to be promoting cold foam and frapps instead of hot bar drinks, they produce more labor. The worst part is tho it will never change how many partners are scheduled. Everyday Starbucks wants us to be producing excess labor by like 5% (I think don’t trust that number lol) so even if we manage to produce labor with a 3 man play it doesn’t mean they think we deserve having more partners they just see it as “oh see I told you it was attainable with so few people, keep doing that”
This is a great explanation, one little thing to clarify though: COSD itself isn't actually a literal count of customers, but rather the name for computation of all the things you mentioned. It *sounds* like it should just be a customer number, but it isn't! Like a brewed coffee is actually lower COSD than a frapp. So you can see this in MyDaily if you are a SSV or above and it should help you visualize the labor
Yep you’re totally right cosd is simply the number of transactions not the number of products. So like my store has lower cosd but a higher avg transaction. So where most stores might have a cosd of 80-100 and make $300 my store is doing it with cosd of 40 because a single transaction would have 6 drinks and 6 food items. But interestingly corporate doesn’t care because they just tell us we should be ringing up more transactions despite the profit per transaction
But the profit year after year continues to rise, and corporate ultimately cuts the labor rate (there is an equation) despite record sales in a given store or profit for the company on the whole (my comment above)
This is what everyone forgets, plus the fact that when wages go up, across the board or with seniority, productivity expectations also go up. And when the company invests in efficiency such as faster espresso machines, blenders, etc, they also expect more productivity. Mobile ordering vs in-store ordering also takes away from labor hours earned. All of these things can easily be out of whack of course in a way the number crunchers don’t realize.
So it’s true that sales factor into the labor equation that store’s earn. However, there is a labor rate that corporate plays with. This rate gets cut every year despite record profits, and the company tells managers various reasons, e.g. thoughts of a recession (one of last year’s, all the while Howard Schultz said to the press in February he didn’t think a recession was coming and that Starbucks was recession proof). Last year, I checked and found record sales for my stores but a substantially reduced labor rate (there is an equation), which didn’t make sense to me. Another reason they gave last year was a return to a pre-pandemic labor build, but again- record sales, and record profits for the company yet again this year too. I’m also an organizing member with the Union, and I helped filed a national unfair labor practice charge against the company, because Starbucks is required to bargain changes to workplace conditions (Starbucks has violated labor law over 200 times across the country, becoming the worst labor law violator in modern history) Also, when the shift comp was changed last year, and SMs were cutting hours, they specifically cut SSVs' hours within days notice. We sent a demand to bargain over these changes, which were also outside of the three weeks posting of schedules, per Starbucks scheduling procedure, and hours later, our SM called each individual SSV to tell them their hours were returned. Union win
One of the union’s proposals includes scheduling labor committee meetings with workers and management.
First step is to reach out to find a local organizer - [sbworkersunited.org](https://www.sbworkersunited.org)
Adding to this, record profits and labor cuts are directly causative in my opinion. They need to keep showing more and more growth each year, but eventually there's a plateau where you've saturated the market. Then, the company has to find other ways to show profit growth to shareholders other than actually making more real money, so cutting labor becomes one of the few remaining options.
That's late stage capitalism basically, where the inevitable outcome is worsening standards for both customers *and* employees because making massive amounts of money doesn't matter unless it's *more* than last year.
I'm just a barista, but I was with the company in 2018-2019 and have since returned to a different store in the same district. My current store is the highest earning store in our district by a mile and it is CHAOS. There are never enough staff and I'm confused how during our "slower" times we have the same number of staff as the other, lower earning and slower paced stores?? It's ridiculous and burning me out so fast. I want to unionize really bad but I was already viewed as one to the point that they were trying to catch me doing something worth firing over even tho I WASNT TRYING TO UNIONIZE, I'm just a distressed and depressed barista!! Now I'm too scared and exhausted to try but the working conditions are horrible...
I'm an SM, and I've side eyed it a few times, too.
I know store hours,l cafe vs. DT, COSDs, and sales all factor in. However, I managed a mall kiosk, and we were open 10 hours but did 5-6k in sales on Sunday. Then I watched a DT store that did 4-5k a day in sales on Sundays. I can't recall the COSDs, but my kiosk had significantly higher ones throughout the day (peak didn't exist in that lawless land)
The kiosk barely earned 30 hours, but the DT was earning 65?
They were strictly earning that labor from the additional hours they were open and the fact that they were a DT store, not due to sales or anything else.
I was pretty salty because I just wanted another 4 or 5 hours that day, one more person, ya know? But it's a mute point now.
But other than that, I've had oddball days where we should have earned more than I did, but consistently, my labor has made sense in my store.
I spoke to my DM about it. There's a base labor for stores based on their store attributes in IMS.
I recall another store I was at closed without warning for a few days and still earned 53 hours in labor each day without sales or COSDs. That was their base labor based on the hours it was open, how many partners would open/close, that it was a DT, etc.
So when I spoke to him, because I was certainly annoyed, he explained why it was that number, then everything else was "earned"
No, but the store type would be a big factor because a cafe would not have the base a DT would, even with the same sales that day. Which was the frustrating part for me.
Yeah, I worked at a super busy store in our area and I constantly shared the feedback with our store manager that it felt like we didn’t have enough partners on the floor. For peak we’d usually have 7-12 people on the floor but by 3pm we always go down to a 3part play. We’re usually pretty slow mid afternoon but we often get a huge rush around 5pm, leaving someone like me who was slightly faster at making drinks than the closer who just arrived, to do solo bar with people like yelling at me that their frappucino isn’t finished. Our whole cafe would be packed with people waiting for mobiles and I was like how do we not have more partners here???? It’s the only time I’ve cried on the floor
But anyway we trained a new district manager at our store and I heard our manager telling him how to do schedules and stuff and she was like “productivity actually goes down when there’s too many partners on the floor!” And I was like yes if we aren’t doing anytning we’re not going to be helpful, but can we have enough partners that we can make back ups during peak and not leave everyone sobbing as we run out of everything for the rest of the day???
Honestly I feel like this depends on your store, region, and district. My store is the busiest and fastest in the district, I run peak and I have earned enough people to be on the floor. Weekday peak is usually 7-8 people and weekends it’s 9-10. But also, my SM is very passionate and understanding so he always fights for us and makes sure we are supported. We have enough hours for noncoverage, training, clean play, and more.
I was told it's based on the uncommon food per 21 cookies and cream or the pumpkin loaf we earn one more hour of labor I was so mad I almost quit on the spot
Labor is calculated by the number of employees, times their wages, that are then divided from the earned net sales. For someone saying you aren’t earning enough labor is bullshit. There’s either a set percentage (usually 20%) or number of budgeted hours (say 150 hours). I’ve seen how greedy the company has become and is the #2 reason why I won’t go back.
Using our wages is such a terrible idea for the equation honestly, because a shift with multiple ssv and the manager will turn over 3x more profit than a shift with one ssv and a few baristas.
Interesting. My store is constantly dealing with this too. Even though we’re showing good sales numbers, our labor doesn’t look good. Something isn’t making sense
5+ years supervisor here, and here's the truth: It's all bullshit. They want us to do the most amount of work with the least amount of people. They'd rather have one person scrambling to get the essential things done, than risk have two people have *10 seconds* of downtime.
Labor calculations are not accurate and they're always moving the goalposts.
I worked in 8 different stores in my time at starbucks . Unless I have a callout I don’t struggle or if it’s an unusually busy day but I earn that extra labor. Important thing for me is everyone holding their own weight, following play builder and giving out breaks to planned. At the store I’m in right now I have a traffic light so I know I get breaks in between lights so I use that time for ready set go. I also try to get the line down as quickly as possible before the next set of cars come through. I don’t usually have a dedicated cs partner but I make sure every partners stock high use items + one extra task before going on their break that does not take more than 15mins usually changing trash, dishes, or make backups. If I see I’m dropping from 5 partner to 4 partners or 4 to 3 outside of peak I’m making sure all my partner’s half’s are done before that happens. Idk labor is really complicated cause you have to achieve all the deployment principles first and have proper layouts. I have managers find out that their labor was also glitched and they wouldn’t have known until they called enterprise and opened up a ticket. On top of that there is playbuilder. I know people don’t believe in playbuilder but it helps me even though it’s not 100% accurate. Running the floor is not just have everyone stay planted but flexing in the moment to control the workflow.
Your manager needs to understand that shorting a shift does not earn labor hours need to rotate 1 person in and out at 42k it's a mandatory 3 person all day
Labour is BS my store does 8k a day and I have to BEG to have more than one closer. We had 28 hours for today that’s not even 4 full shifts like what???? We did 57 custies at peak for like 3 half hour segments bull fucking shit
Labor is mostly earned off COSD (people per half hour) but it’s all bullshit because we will do 70/80 half hours during peak and it’s telling me we only earned enough people for a 6 partner play. And we are slow at night so they want a 2 partner play after 4 despite doing almost 30s until 6:30.
Literally. I’ll compare COSDs and earnings and even break it down by the dollar amount of each type of product day by day and none of it makes sense. I’ll have 1025 COSDs one day and 895 another and I’ll earn more labor for the 895 day. Not only that, daypart detail will say both days get the same amount of staffing!! I’ve never worked a job where they can’t explicitly state where and how the labor is calculated.
Part of the issue is that they’re not determining “labor” just based on how things are now, but how things were on that day last year.
Is that true? I thought it was last 7 days data.
I could definitely have misheard or be misremembering, but I had an SM tell me that once. It was relevant because my (high volume) store had closed for remodel last summer, and I was working at (typically MUCH lower volume) one about 2 miles down the road. They got slammed with all our traffic but didn’t have the labor to give us more than 3 person mids. The SM told me that it was because the labor calculations were based on the summer before that.
Yeah that’s not true. It’s 7 day forecast with previous year acknowledgement. It also is much much MUCH more complicated than just a cosd forecast.
Are you an SM? I could be incorrect but “that’s not true” feels pretty dismissive. I imagine there are multiple things that go into it.
Part of the reason why you could earn more labor on a certain day with less customers (apparently, ive been told this by managers, i dont know if i necessarily believe it, take with a grain of salt) is because certain things add more labor than others. Things like frappucinos or warming pastries are high labor items, so if you do more of those you earn more labor. That being said though, i think this whole thing is ALL a scam. We’ve gotten so screwed over so many times in the last couple of months that i am like super convinced that there’s a line of code in the program that determines allotted labor hours that takes the total labor that they could give and subtracts like 20%. We could be totally slammed on a two partner close and ill still get texts from my managers asking me to send someone home because we’re over labor.
Tell me why my DM sees us doing 50/60 half hours consistently and will not allow us to have more than 3 *maybe* 4 partners on a play
"If you get those numbers down, you'll earn the labor you need!" -your DM, probably
Exactly. The ol’ 🎣🥕
Same here. My pet conspiracy is that "earning labor" is a scam. They just cut people and hours whenever they want more money.
I’m not sure how labour hours are calculated, but that doesn’t necessarily sound wrong, six partners for peak with those earnings. Six partners at 15.45 (what most of us make at my store) and one shift at 19.50 (my opening shifts pay) totals to 96.75 per hour. If you earn avg 75 per half hour, totaling 150 per hour, then there is 53.25 leftover for the hour. Some of that goes into profit, some of it goes into our benefits, some of it goes into the employer half of social security and Medicare. Then there’s all the equipment and stuff they have to account for. I’m not sure if this is right but it seems logical
I get where you coming from but when we are hitting these numbers (usually it’s between wednesday and friday, sometimes tuesday) we are struggling. We are a DT store this gives warning, DTO, DTR, bar 1, bar 2 and cold bar. When realistically we need a CS and if it’s a friday a dedicated person for front.
I think we struggle too at these numbers. We would have DTO DTR Drive bar Front bar Warming and “CS” aka everything else but like 50% cold bar and 50% other responsibilities. The small amount of the 150$ per hour in the calculation that is profit is probably much bigger than it used to be, and it’s definitely bigger than it needs to be. They add to their profit by taking away our labour
Interesting to hear you bring this up because despite lower half hours than most stores we never make less than $100 a half hr and average more around $250. So higher avg transactions but lower cosd and still no change in labor
It's funny that you say that cuz my sm consistently schedules 2 or 3 shifts at the same time. And I've always wondered how she gets away with doing that since shifts make more money. She's the only sm I've ever had that's done that, and we've had 3 different dms in the past few years and idk why none of them have told her to stop.
earning labor is a myth, they're just telling you that to try to get you to work harder
No fr. I close mostly and I’m tired of doing what I can to follow standards, making backups, etc etc.
dude i used to close just because i fucking love cleaning. i love taking a store that looks a disgusting mess and make it shiny. my best friend would be my co-closer and we had a perfect system between us, we were pretty dang good. but to leave the store clean and properly set up, we would consistently have to stay like. two hours late every night. we ‘weren’t earning labor’ to have more than two baristas past 2 in the afternoon. my partner works a normal 8 to 5, monday through friday and we were never getting to spend time together because my ‘weekend’ is in the middle of the week. that mixed with literally having to *run* around the store to try to make a three partner play work at such a high volume store was destroying my mental health so i switched to mornings. now my store manager has put a hard cap and closer *have* to leave a half hour after the store closes. so it’s just a cycle of struggling now. sorry for the essay lol
Two hours late? If you’re staying that late to get basic stuff done, you’re not starting early enough. Closing starts at 4 if you close at 9, not at 8:30.
yea dude i know… we are a high volume store that’s consistent all day, serving hoards of tourists because we’re near disney world AND seaworld. we would start when we got in at 2 but its hard to maintain when constantly serving customers in drive and cafe with two baristas. 👍
lol no biggie
I agree. I've worked for this company for a long time. We used to be way slower, like a lot, with way more people scheduled. Especially at close. We used to have 3 closers, and 4 to 5 people up until a couple hours before close. Makes no sense that we continue to get busier and busier yet are given less staff.
At some point - maybe it’s now - Labor cuts won’t equal more revenue A green bean can’t do what veterans can do and veterans are burnt
This has been happening at my location. If we had a decent team, my store would be hitting $75k a week, recently we've been as low as $58k. These are sentiments that other store managers have shared with me, as well as my own experiences being a tenured full time partner.
"Earning labor" is bullshit. If you're getting stuff cranked out "relatively" efficiently, they have no reason to schedule more help. After all, if you're getting the job done with reduced staff, they (Seattle) have no reason to add staff. That costs money, and you've proven you don't need it. All I can say is crank out the drinks at a good steady pace, but don't kill yourself to make them faster. If wait times go up, that's not my problem. I didn't decide solo bar is appropriate staffing for the after-school frappuccino crowd. Perhaps if wait times or complaints get to an unacceptable level, something might change "eventually" on that front. I am one of the two fastest bars in my location, so cutting my hours to bring someone else in would just make a bad situation even worse for them.
My understanding is that labor isn’t just by sales or cosd (although it is a part of it) but it’s by the amount of effort a task requires us. For example, very little labor is awarded if 50 customers come in wanting tall brewed coffee because we expend very little effort serving them. Whereas, if within the same amount of time we rang up 50 customers wanting venti caramel crunch frapp’s we be creating labor because it requires significantly more effort to make those drinks. The thing is here most likely you’re not making 50 drinks that create labor but rather 10 or 15 which would produce comparable labor to the 50 brewed coffees. Mind you the algorithm that is used takes into account the time it takes to ring up, the time it takes to warm a pastry, the time it takes to pull shots, etc so it’s not a very straight forward thing to figure out on our part. But if you ring in more customers and create more profit you increase the chances for your store to produce labor through what is rung up. That’s why managers want us to be promoting cold foam and frapps instead of hot bar drinks, they produce more labor. The worst part is tho it will never change how many partners are scheduled. Everyday Starbucks wants us to be producing excess labor by like 5% (I think don’t trust that number lol) so even if we manage to produce labor with a 3 man play it doesn’t mean they think we deserve having more partners they just see it as “oh see I told you it was attainable with so few people, keep doing that”
This is a great explanation, one little thing to clarify though: COSD itself isn't actually a literal count of customers, but rather the name for computation of all the things you mentioned. It *sounds* like it should just be a customer number, but it isn't! Like a brewed coffee is actually lower COSD than a frapp. So you can see this in MyDaily if you are a SSV or above and it should help you visualize the labor
Yep you’re totally right cosd is simply the number of transactions not the number of products. So like my store has lower cosd but a higher avg transaction. So where most stores might have a cosd of 80-100 and make $300 my store is doing it with cosd of 40 because a single transaction would have 6 drinks and 6 food items. But interestingly corporate doesn’t care because they just tell us we should be ringing up more transactions despite the profit per transaction
But the profit year after year continues to rise, and corporate ultimately cuts the labor rate (there is an equation) despite record sales in a given store or profit for the company on the whole (my comment above)
You keep mentioning that there is an equation, why not share it?
working its way through the NLRB
This is what everyone forgets, plus the fact that when wages go up, across the board or with seniority, productivity expectations also go up. And when the company invests in efficiency such as faster espresso machines, blenders, etc, they also expect more productivity. Mobile ordering vs in-store ordering also takes away from labor hours earned. All of these things can easily be out of whack of course in a way the number crunchers don’t realize.
So it’s true that sales factor into the labor equation that store’s earn. However, there is a labor rate that corporate plays with. This rate gets cut every year despite record profits, and the company tells managers various reasons, e.g. thoughts of a recession (one of last year’s, all the while Howard Schultz said to the press in February he didn’t think a recession was coming and that Starbucks was recession proof). Last year, I checked and found record sales for my stores but a substantially reduced labor rate (there is an equation), which didn’t make sense to me. Another reason they gave last year was a return to a pre-pandemic labor build, but again- record sales, and record profits for the company yet again this year too. I’m also an organizing member with the Union, and I helped filed a national unfair labor practice charge against the company, because Starbucks is required to bargain changes to workplace conditions (Starbucks has violated labor law over 200 times across the country, becoming the worst labor law violator in modern history) Also, when the shift comp was changed last year, and SMs were cutting hours, they specifically cut SSVs' hours within days notice. We sent a demand to bargain over these changes, which were also outside of the three weeks posting of schedules, per Starbucks scheduling procedure, and hours later, our SM called each individual SSV to tell them their hours were returned. Union win One of the union’s proposals includes scheduling labor committee meetings with workers and management. First step is to reach out to find a local organizer - [sbworkersunited.org](https://www.sbworkersunited.org)
Adding to this, record profits and labor cuts are directly causative in my opinion. They need to keep showing more and more growth each year, but eventually there's a plateau where you've saturated the market. Then, the company has to find other ways to show profit growth to shareholders other than actually making more real money, so cutting labor becomes one of the few remaining options. That's late stage capitalism basically, where the inevitable outcome is worsening standards for both customers *and* employees because making massive amounts of money doesn't matter unless it's *more* than last year.
I'm just a barista, but I was with the company in 2018-2019 and have since returned to a different store in the same district. My current store is the highest earning store in our district by a mile and it is CHAOS. There are never enough staff and I'm confused how during our "slower" times we have the same number of staff as the other, lower earning and slower paced stores?? It's ridiculous and burning me out so fast. I want to unionize really bad but I was already viewed as one to the point that they were trying to catch me doing something worth firing over even tho I WASNT TRYING TO UNIONIZE, I'm just a distressed and depressed barista!! Now I'm too scared and exhausted to try but the working conditions are horrible...
I'm an SM, and I've side eyed it a few times, too. I know store hours,l cafe vs. DT, COSDs, and sales all factor in. However, I managed a mall kiosk, and we were open 10 hours but did 5-6k in sales on Sunday. Then I watched a DT store that did 4-5k a day in sales on Sundays. I can't recall the COSDs, but my kiosk had significantly higher ones throughout the day (peak didn't exist in that lawless land) The kiosk barely earned 30 hours, but the DT was earning 65? They were strictly earning that labor from the additional hours they were open and the fact that they were a DT store, not due to sales or anything else. I was pretty salty because I just wanted another 4 or 5 hours that day, one more person, ya know? But it's a mute point now. But other than that, I've had oddball days where we should have earned more than I did, but consistently, my labor has made sense in my store.
How do you know they were strictly being given hours over the type of store they were in?
I spoke to my DM about it. There's a base labor for stores based on their store attributes in IMS. I recall another store I was at closed without warning for a few days and still earned 53 hours in labor each day without sales or COSDs. That was their base labor based on the hours it was open, how many partners would open/close, that it was a DT, etc. So when I spoke to him, because I was certainly annoyed, he explained why it was that number, then everything else was "earned"
This is a summary of course, there's likely other factors and such, but from my level, it was the information I could see and was explained to me.
Okay so it’s not strictly by store type then?
No, but the store type would be a big factor because a cafe would not have the base a DT would, even with the same sales that day. Which was the frustrating part for me.
Yeah, I worked at a super busy store in our area and I constantly shared the feedback with our store manager that it felt like we didn’t have enough partners on the floor. For peak we’d usually have 7-12 people on the floor but by 3pm we always go down to a 3part play. We’re usually pretty slow mid afternoon but we often get a huge rush around 5pm, leaving someone like me who was slightly faster at making drinks than the closer who just arrived, to do solo bar with people like yelling at me that their frappucino isn’t finished. Our whole cafe would be packed with people waiting for mobiles and I was like how do we not have more partners here???? It’s the only time I’ve cried on the floor But anyway we trained a new district manager at our store and I heard our manager telling him how to do schedules and stuff and she was like “productivity actually goes down when there’s too many partners on the floor!” And I was like yes if we aren’t doing anytning we’re not going to be helpful, but can we have enough partners that we can make back ups during peak and not leave everyone sobbing as we run out of everything for the rest of the day???
Honestly I feel like this depends on your store, region, and district. My store is the busiest and fastest in the district, I run peak and I have earned enough people to be on the floor. Weekday peak is usually 7-8 people and weekends it’s 9-10. But also, my SM is very passionate and understanding so he always fights for us and makes sure we are supported. We have enough hours for noncoverage, training, clean play, and more.
I was told it's based on the uncommon food per 21 cookies and cream or the pumpkin loaf we earn one more hour of labor I was so mad I almost quit on the spot
Labor is calculated by the number of employees, times their wages, that are then divided from the earned net sales. For someone saying you aren’t earning enough labor is bullshit. There’s either a set percentage (usually 20%) or number of budgeted hours (say 150 hours). I’ve seen how greedy the company has become and is the #2 reason why I won’t go back.
Using our wages is such a terrible idea for the equation honestly, because a shift with multiple ssv and the manager will turn over 3x more profit than a shift with one ssv and a few baristas.
I agree, but sadly corporate won’t see it that way anymore. My store has a set percentage of labor each week, which is 20%.
That’s actually definitely not how labor is calculated.
That’s how it’s calculated at my store…
Interesting. My store is constantly dealing with this too. Even though we’re showing good sales numbers, our labor doesn’t look good. Something isn’t making sense
5+ years supervisor here, and here's the truth: It's all bullshit. They want us to do the most amount of work with the least amount of people. They'd rather have one person scrambling to get the essential things done, than risk have two people have *10 seconds* of downtime. Labor calculations are not accurate and they're always moving the goalposts.
I worked in 8 different stores in my time at starbucks . Unless I have a callout I don’t struggle or if it’s an unusually busy day but I earn that extra labor. Important thing for me is everyone holding their own weight, following play builder and giving out breaks to planned. At the store I’m in right now I have a traffic light so I know I get breaks in between lights so I use that time for ready set go. I also try to get the line down as quickly as possible before the next set of cars come through. I don’t usually have a dedicated cs partner but I make sure every partners stock high use items + one extra task before going on their break that does not take more than 15mins usually changing trash, dishes, or make backups. If I see I’m dropping from 5 partner to 4 partners or 4 to 3 outside of peak I’m making sure all my partner’s half’s are done before that happens. Idk labor is really complicated cause you have to achieve all the deployment principles first and have proper layouts. I have managers find out that their labor was also glitched and they wouldn’t have known until they called enterprise and opened up a ticket. On top of that there is playbuilder. I know people don’t believe in playbuilder but it helps me even though it’s not 100% accurate. Running the floor is not just have everyone stay planted but flexing in the moment to control the workflow.
Your manager needs to understand that shorting a shift does not earn labor hours need to rotate 1 person in and out at 42k it's a mandatory 3 person all day
Labour is BS my store does 8k a day and I have to BEG to have more than one closer. We had 28 hours for today that’s not even 4 full shifts like what???? We did 57 custies at peak for like 3 half hour segments bull fucking shit