Starbucks & Scheduling: Fast Change

Parent Cafe
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<p>You’re right, sally, after years of working for a company with a heavy turn over and who is infamous for their values and work environments, I do not know the challenges of discussing issues with managers. I especially do not understand such from the viewpoint of a young person. I was wrong. </p>

<p>I wish I could continue to discuss on how I do agree with you on certain topics in terms of scheduling and further explain what a sufficient system would be (perhaps event what checks should be put into place), but I simply do not know what I am talking about. </p>

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<p>Sorry, Niquii–didn’t mean to make you defensive. I know you are around the age of Ms. Navarro. It is not about you. All I said was that in my experience, young people (and others worried about losing their jobs) don’t often advocate for themselves. Both you and calmom seemed to suggest it would have been a simple matter for Ms. Navarro to approach her manager and ask for better hours. As determined and focused as she seemed to be, she was apparently unable to do this seemingly simple thing.</p>

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There is also no evidence that it wasn’t the case. We also do not know the extent to which the manager knew she was the subject of an article and whether that influenced their decisions. We have only a narrow snapshot of what happened, but given the pressures and attitudes of many managers at these companies, I don’t think the scenario she described is at all unlikely, though it may be unreasonable.</p>

<p>Am I the only person who has had either mediocre or outright terrible management before? People who you know you cannot come to with a problem, because they think the easiest way to eliminate a problem is to terminate someone’s employment? People who (despite the notoriously high managerial standards* at places like Panera) play favorites, or get lazy, or think that a minimum wage job must be the most important thing in someone’s life and therefore won’t accept other priorities (like school, children, etc).</p>

<p>I worked for 8 years in food service, with managers fantastic, mediocre, and outright terrible. I was fired** from my first chain-restaurant job because I missed a shift. One. That I had told them I would not be able to work the day I was offered the job. That I reminded them about a month beforehand. And again two weeks beforehand. And that I got scheduled for. And that I told them, after seeing the schedule, that I could not work - as I had promised on day 1. It was a college final.</p>

<p>I spent a year working as a temp (after the restaurants), and got friendly with the staff.*** They had lists of companies that treated their employees well, and others that treated even the apparent best with scorn and disdain. It turns out that being a manager does not preclude one being a selfish jerk, and in some companies that is even a favorable characteristic for promotion.</p>

<p>*: Ha ha.</p>

<p>**: I was never technically fired, I was just taken off the schedule and told that I needed to talk to the manager about my attitude if I wanted to keep working. But “fired” is more succinct and pretty accurate, especially considering that one of the assistant managers later told me that the “come talk to me” junk was just so the manager could fire me in person.</p>

<p>***: Very friendly. Married one of them.</p>

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<p>Just as an observation, one of the core principles of management is maximizing the output of the employee for the minimum of input. There are competitive minimums in some positions, negotiated minimums in others, and humane minimums in at least some. But there are also a heck of a lot of people out there in management positions who feel they need (or just outright want) to push workers (especially without negotiated protections or competitive options) way past humane limits.</p>

<p>Basically, I am saying that managers, like their employees, run the gamut from saints to scoundrels. But scoundrel managers stick around longer than scoundrel employees. They can squeeze people until they pop, show excellent results (in many cases), and get praised often without the praisers even knowing how they do it.</p>

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<p>I don’t understand the point of this post. If somebody has to work at 6 o’clock in the morning they can get adequate notice of their shift time (a week rather than a day in advance). If somebody has to be sent home because it’s not busy, they can be paid a reasonable amount for having come in to work as scheduled. When I was a teen working this kind of job (decades ago, in Canada) labor law required that the employee would be paid for some minimum number of hours in this scenario. I don’t understand why some believe that the richest country in the world can’t improve the working conditions of its working poor.</p>

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<p>^Exactly! And I don’t know why a company like Starbucks that prides itself on customer experience would make the short-sighted decision to allow a scheduling program to have people come in to work on two or three hours sleep because they have back-to-back shifts.</p>

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<p>When my D worked for Starbucks an employee would need 20 hrs a week for a certain period to mantain their health insurance. They would plead with the manager to,make sure they got their twenty hours scheduled. It was disturbing how often they lost their health insurance because they were not given those twenty hours. </p>

<p>It appeared as if management was purposefully having that happen. </p>

<p>If you go onto any site there are many,many reviews from Starbucks employees discussing the problems.</p>

<p>As long as there are more people looking for jobs than jobs available companies will get away with treating employees badly.</p>

<p>I hate to believe that young workers today believe that this is the status quo and that this is the way corporations should treat employees. </p>

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<p>@cosmicfish

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<p>But that’s my point – there is no evidence one way or the other – so why assume that the problem was 100% due to Starbuck’s scheduling practices? </p>

<p>When my daughter graduated from high school, she needed a summer job but she also had a 2-week trip abroad scheduled with her dance troupe. I was surprised when she proudly announced the week before her graduation that she had been found a job with a major local retailer and was starting work right away. “But how can you start now, when you are leaving for China in 2 weeks?” She said-- “no problem, I already told the manager that I will be taking that time off.” Over that summer she was always working different shifts, and it is true that the first week or so after she returned from her travels that she was distressed because she was assigned fewer hours than she wanted —but she made sure that co-workers knew that she was willing to take over others’ shifts as needed, so she ended up with the hours she needed over the summer.</p>

<p>It seems to me that the rest of the article describes other instances where the young woman caused frustration with others in her life because of poor communication skills or passivity. She is described as needing to “work up the courage” to ask friends and relatives to watch her son – but of course she would only make the situation worse for them by delaying the time when she notified them she needed help. When my daughter was young, the mom of one of her good friends was a single parent with a waitressing job, odd shifts – and I was her back up childcare in the evenings. I knew to expect the little girl to be dropped off at my house on short notice at varying hours … it was just part of the deal. No drama. </p>

<p>In the article, the boyfriend ends up leaving because the young woman can’t get it together to get her driver’s license. The article kind of paints a picture of everything bad happens to this poor, sweet, helpless woman - but I think that maybe she could have made an appointment at the DMV, let her boss know in advance that she would not be able to come into work on that day, and go through with it. </p>

<p>I’m not saying that it is easy to work for Starbucks or any other food outlet or retailer. But my kids had shift work like that while they were in high school, and they weren’t ever assigned to shifts during school hours. I think that they simply told their employers at the outset what hours they were available. </p>

<p>@sally305-- I didn’t say that it would be easy for the young person to assert herself – I just said that is a skill she needs to develop, and my beef with the article is that it portrayed her situation as being totally out of her control, whereas the truth seems to be something more along the lines that she wasn’t very good at making her needs known to others. I don’t know how Starbucks scheduling works – but my guess is that they probably ask employees to designate which times they are available for work – so, for example, a student can indicate that she is only available on evenings and weekends. I know that is a standard question on job applications for part time, shift work, and I am guessing that is something that can be entered into the software program that does the scheduling. Employee A can only work after 4pm on weekdays, or all day on weekends; employee B works M-F only; employee C never works on Sunday. And I’m guessing that the young woman in the article was so afraid that she might miss the opportunity to work a few hours and earn money, that she told her employer at the outset she was available for all shifts, 7 days a week, and then was afraid to make changes. </p>

<p>Again, I am not saying that it’s easy-- but assertiveness and self-advocacy are essential workplace skills for anyone - at just about any level and any position – and the people who have or develop those abilities are the ones who end up getting promotions or moving onto better work. It’s not particularly helpful to portray Starbucks as the big evil because their scheduling process caused hardship in an employee’s life, without any evidence that the employee had made any effort to seek relief. </p>

<p>From the employer’s end: they don’t care what employees’ personal problems are, they just want to have the staffing needed at the times they need it. A high percentage of employees at a place like Starbucks are people who need and want part-time work, to fit around their other time obligations (such as school, or a second job with more predictable hours). The last thing an employer wants is to have an employee not show up or show up late for a shift because of scheduling issues – and the advantage of using software to do scheduling is that a computer database can easily sift through and find which employees are available at a given time. </p>

<p>I understand that the downside for the employee who says she can only work Monday-Wed, is that there is no guarantee of getting assignments on those days either, so an employee who wants to maximize hours is theoretically better off to also maximize availability — but people also need to be able to set boundaries in their lives for themselves. And sometimes that will be at the expense of loss of potential earnings – but I think that is also something of a mind-set issue. That is, somewhere along the line there are employees who have managed to strike a better balance between blocking off the times they are available to work vs. the number of hours they would like to be offered week. </p>

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<p>Yeah, that only works if you know how to drive. Part of “getting your license” is learning how to drive. Which involves finding someone else with a car who is willing to sit in it while you practice. You’re not born knowing how to drive!</p>

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<p>Starbucks is not her parent. It’s starting to sound like she’s very lucky they hired her at all given her lack of life skills. I agree with Calmom on this one.</p>

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<p>CF, my impression from the article is that she only needed to schedule the test. It generally takes at least 2 weeks to get a DMV appointment anyway, so advance planning is involved. Given that the test was something her boyfriend was insisting on, I’ll bet the b.f. was happy to coach her through driving practice ahead of time. It seems to be an issue that contributed to the breakup of the relationship, so it went beyond the job situation – the article gives the impression that the boyfriend left out of exasperation after she failed to meet a promised deadline. </p>

<p>When she did manage to schedule the test she passed, apparently on the first try - and I’m wondering if the circumstance that finally forced her to take the step was the loss of the boyfriend, who probably had been filling the role of chauffeur while they were together.</p>

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<p>I was the one who mentioned 24/7 availablity for a 15 hour a week job. It was not at Starbucks, but at a resort hotel.</p>

<p>But I do have a Starbucks story, which may help some of you understand poverty. My sister got a job a Starbucks. She didn’t complain when they switched her to a different store, in a dicey neighborhood, working shifts that required her to come to work in the dark, or leave work in the dark. But she slipped and fell on one of those dark nights. She hurt her wrist but didn’t have the money to go to a doctor. On nights that she closed, part of her duty was moving things around and mopping the floor. Which she coudn’t do because her wrist was hurt. As a mature woman, she did talk to management, who told her she could get out of the mopping job if she brought a doctor’s note. But she couldn’t get a doctor’s note because she didn’t have the money to go to a doctor. So she was fired from the Starbucks job for not being willing (able) to mop. Leaving her with no job at all.</p>

<p>This is real life, folks, for millions of working adults.</p>

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<p>Yup. </p>

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<p>That’s awful, missy pie, but people need to hear stories like that. There are so many in our country who have no understanding of what it means to be poor and instead choose to accuse people of being lazy or unmotivated. They have NO idea of how fragile the web is for people like your sister. I hope she is doing better now.</p>