Thousands of unionized Starbucks workers will walk off their jobs on Thursday, with the one-day work stoppages coming to protest the company’s stance with shops that voted to organize, according to Starbucks Workers United.
The labor action is timed to for Starbucks’ Red Cup Day, an annual event in which the coffee giant hands out holiday-themed reusable cups. Starbucks has refused to negotiate in good faith over staffing and other issues that are particularly acute during promotions, according to the union.
“Starbucks is creating unnecessarily stressful working conditions by scheduling promotion after promotion without increasing staffing,” Neha Cremin, a Starbucks worker in Oklahoma City, said in a statement to CBS MoneyWatch. “Starbucks has made it clear that they won’t listen to workers, so we’re advocating for ourselves by going on strike.”
Things are generally cheaper when you buy more of them. It’s true that once you pass a certain threshold this isn’t as significant, but that threshold can be pretty high.
Then you get into things like commodities trading (eg buying and maybe even selling futures), which is something Starbucks engages in. It would be very hard for a small shop to participate in commodities trading (barriers of entry due to size, time in the day, etc), let alone do it well.
There’s also a bunch of little things that ar a “do it once for all stores” or “do it once for a single store”. At a mom and pop that usually means that they won’t be able to do it as well as a bigger store because of time and resource constraints.
Starbucks can essentially engage in a perverted form of collective bargaining, where because their demand is so high, they can make suppliers cut deep, deep into their margins and fight for a chance to secure a contract with Starbucks. Even if they aren’t a monopoly, they’re big enough that they can throw their weight around, especially in “foreign markets” with already depressed wages.