What it does: Sells ready-to-serve, ready-to-drink coffee and coffee beans.
Mission: To inspire and nurture the human spirit—one person, one cup, one neighbourhood at a time.
Size and presence: 383,000 employees.
Best known for: The world’s largest coffee chain.
The good bits: Great deal benefit packages. Fun and relaxed working environment for corporate roles.
The not-so-good bits: Customer service-based role that might be tiring for partners in the store.
Starbucks was founded by three academics, Jerry Baldwin, Gordon Bowker, and Zev Siegl, in 1971. Starbucks opened its first store in Pike Place Market, Seattle. The founders named the store after a character from Herman Merville’s novel, Moby Dick. Starbucks partnered with Alfred Peet, a coffee-roasting entrepreneur, to become their initial coffee bean supplier. Peet, who was an immigrant who imported coffee, encouraged the founders to base their business on selling high-quality coffee. Afterwards, Starbucks opened four stores in Seattle.
Starbucks owes its popularity and major development to Howard Schultz, who joined the company in 1982 as the head of marketing. He was quite ambitious to make a significant advancement in Starbucks, proposing the idea of making Starbucks a nationwide coffee house chain to Bowker and Baldwin who was keen to keep Starbucks focused on selling coffee and equipment instead of selling espresso and cappuccino. Seeing a dead end, Schultz resigned and opened his own coffee house, Il Giornale. Afterwards, Bowker and Baldwin decided to sell Starbucks and Schultz bought it through Il Giornale and backed up investors.
With Schultz’s strategy to provide a cafe concept with additional sales of coffee beans and other equipment, Starbucks grew significantly from four stores to 100 stores in the span of four years. Starbucks soon expanded nationally and internationally under Schultz’s guidance. The company became the biggest coffee house chain in the world, serving in dozens of countries and operating over 32,000 stores.
Starbucks prefers to call its employees partners and it is full of young people. Retail partners will obviously be exposed to customer service-related tasks and nuances that will not be 24/7 cheerful and interesting, there will be a difficult customer to handle at some point and it might be tiring sometimes. Most corporate partners stated that they have fun, social, and supportive co-workers and the environment is relaxed and flexible, though it still depends on the department. Although there may be a sudden change of decision that needs an immediate response and a heavy workload at some times, work and work-life balance are still possible to achieve for corporate partners.
Job openings for retail stores are refreshed and updated every 90 days on the company’s websites. Starbucks urged applicants to create an account and set up a notification for job opening alerts. Many partners were applying from its websites, and some others and former interns were applying through college recruitment. Barista interviews were mostly done directly in the store. Interview for roles in store is a casual, mostly behavioural question, and some managers will ask candidates to make a cup of coffee and serve customers for a test.
The hiring process for roles outside the retail stores will be done differently. The graduates will need to pass through three of four rounds of interviews. The same process applies to interns, though internship interviews might be shorter up to two rounds depending on the role. The first round would be a phone interview for screening purposes, the following process would be an interview with the hiring manager and then proceeded with a group panel interview. The process may take days or even a month before HR sends the offering.
Coffeehouse retail is Starbucks' core business, however, the career path in the company is not limited to store-related roles. It also offers corporate and manufacturing & distribution roles. Retail stores’ roles would include barista, supervisor, and manager. Barista is the role Starbucks will always need in their stores. While corporate and manufacturing & distribution roles are varied, thus, it’s safe to say Starbucks is generally a good place to start a career in many areas of expertise, it’s even a good place to start as a tech graduate. Roles outside retail positions available in accounting and finance, legal, public affairs and communications, marketing and creatives studio, store development and designs, human resources, sales and account management, and many more.
The company also offers internships in Starbucks Support Center and Starbucks Technology Center, in which interns will experience professional development, networking, and intern events.
Barista commonly receives $29,000 up to $31,000 annually. While the corporate and tech roles will get paid relatively higher. A software engineer may receive $114,000, an application developer receives $115,000, a business analyst receives $82,000, a staff accountant receives $73,000, and a store designer receives $104,000. While interns get paid ranging from $2,000 to $8,000 monthly, depending on the roles.
Starbucks is committed to not only doing business and earning profit but also aiming to support and uplift the local and global communities, through its social programs and its ethical sourcing. With the Starbucks Foundation, the company has been awarding grants to nonprofit organizations worldwide and nationwide for years. The grants are allocated for supporting local coffee and tea communities, battling hunger, uplifting economic mobility, and many more. The Starbucks Foundation also invests in disaster response initiatives.
In the Hunger Relief program, Starbucks invested $52,5 million in the program and reinvested $100 million over the next decade. The company partnered with Feeding America for this program, aside from operating its own Starbucks Food Share, where Starbucks’ partners gathered surplus food and donated it to local food banks.
The media agreed that the biggest controversy ever hit Starbucks in the U.S. happened in Philadelphia, in 2018 when two black men were arrested for sitting in the store without buying anything. It started when the store manager called the police, reporting that there were two black men in the store who were not buying anything and refused to leave. There is a video that went viral showing police officers standing around the said customers who are calmly explaining that they’re there in a meeting with someone. And though shortly after a white man—the customer’s friend/acquaintance—came and argued with the officers, and said that they were acting discriminatory, they still arrested the pair for trespassing suspicion. It resulted in an immediate backlash that not only the CEO Howard Schultz prompted an official statement to apologize to the pair, but it also forced the company to announce that it would close more than 8,000 stores in the U.S. for several hours for racial bias training.