Starbucks Doesn't Just Sell Coffee, It Sells Kool-Aid

A piece in Fortune two days ago caught my eye: Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is annoyed employees didn’t listen to his back-to-office request—and now he’s ordering a return. This echoes policy changes by figures like Elon Musk at his companies: the COVID panic is over, and it's time to drop all the charades. Although this is behind a paywall, this site carries a version from Starbucks's CEO, Howard Schultz, himself "Message to Starbucks support partners: Returning to each other and to the office" ["support partners" are headquarters management employees in Starbucks-speak]:

I want to share a change in our policy about hybrid work consistent with our past, but boldly about our future. Before I do, let me share context.

The pandemic was a full-out attack on the ideas that make Starbucks, Starbucks. It disrupted human connection. It made the world harder for so many. And it threatened our ability to be a safe haven and a Third Place.

At the SSC ["SSC" is Starbucks-speak for "headquarters"] and across our regional offices, we had the privilege and the ability to pivot to virtual work. Most of us stopped coming into the office—at first, because of safety, and to protect ourselves and our loved ones. As days stretched into weeks, many of us claimed new freedoms, pioneered new ways of working, achieved new productivity.

Notice how the corporate culture is described in saccharine terms -- the work environment is "a safe haven and a Third Place". And note how the headquarters employees are flattered -- even forced to work from home away from the headquarters safe environment and Third Place (whatever that means), they've "claimed new freedoms, pioneered new ways of working, achieved new productivity". How gloriously wonderful! But there are snakes even in the Garden of Eden!

But many partners [in Starbucks-speak, non-headquarters employees] didn’t have that privilege. They had to keep coming into their workplace—our stores, our plants, our distribution centers—day after day. They faced the hardship. They faced the challenges in their communities—deeply, passionately and often with great heroics.

Today, when we talk with our store partners, we hear how much they need us. As the nation comes out of the pandemic, they want to thrive, not just survive. We need to support them better. We need to simplify their jobs. We need to dive even deeper into each store and every store to support partners the way they need us to, now.

Note the overall weepiness of the tone. The actual line workers faced hardship. They faced challenges. And now they need us! We need to support them better! And thus we must change!

Effective Jan. 30, all SSC partners within commuting distance are expected to work in the SSC a minimum of three days per week. To rebuild our connection to each other and synchronize teams and efforts, two of your days will be Tuesday and Wednesday—and the third day will be aligned on in partnership with your leader and team. The other two days of the week are work from anywhere—home, office, a Starbucks store, or beyond.

But this isn't done for the reason someone like Elon Musk might do it. Not at all!

We are a company rooted in human connection. We must have authentic and deep human connection everywhere we work—in stores, the SSC, roasting plants, coffee farms—everywhere. While we have built transactive connection and on-screen skills through COVID, we have lost a true human connection at the SSC. We need to rebuild that. Failing to do so as we emerge from the pandemic puts us at a great loss, depriving us of vital relationships and the impromptu connections and idea generation that comes from convening in person. In a real sense, the more we lose human connection with each other and within our stores and the vital relationships that define who we are, we put our brand into peril.

It's not that nobody's showing up and work isn't gettsing done, nothing like that. It's juist that we're losing deep, authentic, human connection and vital relationships! Who can object to that? Beyond that,

Our culture depends on rituals—from coffee tastings to storytelling to seeing how our design experiences look end-to-end by putting the work up on a wall, and on and on. We will revive and reinvent these rituals to build our culture. And we will use in-person time to spend on our Reinvention efforts, forging the deeper hard choices, trade-offs, and integration, so we succeed.

This is the gaseous, jardon-laden patter the liberal arts-educated, feminized "support partners" learned at their colleges and universities. In fact, this is the preferred day-to-day style of the new gentry, and Mr Schultz even refers indirectly to the class bias inherent in the Starbucks environment. As he said, the line workers, the store managers, the baristas, the people who actually produced the coffee, never got to work from home. But oddly, when he brings up "fairness", he doesn't even mention those:

I applaud the hard work from all of us. But it’s time to right something that has been inherently not fair. Partners in our offices have had the privilege of not coming into the workplace and when we embarked on hybrid work last year, each of us made a promise to each other to be in the office between one to two days a week. From our badging data, it’s clear that a good number of SSC partners are not meeting their minimum promise of one day a week. This is why I am also announcing that this policy—three days in the SSC and regional offices—is a requirement, and we expect every partner to respect it like we do every other workplace policy. It’s that critical to our business success.

This is an internal issue specific only to the headquarters gentry. The only unfairness is that some of those aren't even spending one day a week at the office. So instead, to make this fair, everyone has to spend three days a week at the office, no exceptions, unless you can find one, of course. (If I were an employee, er, partner, I'd raise my hand and ask why they can't just make the one day a week compulsory instead of changing it to three, but I guess that's why I don't work at Starbucks, or at least not as a "support partner".)

I have a couple of takeaways. One is that the former Twitter culture portrayed in the "My Day at Work" TikTok video isn't limited to Twitter, even though Musk seems to have eliminated it there within days of its appearance on TikTok. There's an extraordinarily pampered new gentry class everywhere, it seems. And Schultz says this will continue:

Additionally, our Modern Workplace team has spent the past two years tirelessly redesigning a workplace of the future with countless amenities to support an inspiring and uplifting environment. We are providing those resources in support of enabling your very best contributions.

The smoothie bars, the free breakfast and lunch, the yoga rooms, and more will continue, to enable the best contributions of the "support partners". But as this site says,

Starbucks is the largest coffeehouse restaurant in the world with over 20,000 locations in more than 60 countries worldwide. The restaurant is very trendy today and has a perception of providing quality coffee products. Because of that, Starbucks menu prices are higher than what you would expect to pay for a coffee at other fast-food restaurants.

Starbucks, much like pre-Musk Twitter, is selling a gentrified, in some measure class-based, world view, not just a cup of coffee. And there's clearly, as with pre-Musk Twitter, an expectation that a certain class of headquarters employees is entitled to live out the full benefits of this world view, irrespective of any actual contribution.

My other takeaway is that corporate Kool-Aid is nothing new.