I work for both. I started in a Barnes. Then I moved to corporate, and I’m currently working Monday-Thursday at a collegeBux and Friday/Sunday at my corporate store. I think the superiority comes from not understanding how crappy some licensed stores are treated/trained. The training for licensed stores is near nonexistent. Then people will literally say “you’re not a real Starbucks” at the college. like.... yes we are. Everything is exactly the same. Except we can’t redeem rewards -because our POS is completely different- but the drinks are the same, the food is the same. Get over yourself. It’s a definite hierarchy, but not with everyone, as you said earlier.

I started at corporate, then went licensed, then back corporate. Corporate employees just don’t really understand that licensed Starbucks literally get put on the back burner of whatever store they’re in (atleast in my experience) we weren’t given the tools we needed to be great and it was so frustrating. Staffing is terrible because all of my licensed bosses were hired by the store I was in and didn’t even know how to make drinks. So they didn’t understand how stressful it could be, making working in a licensed store way harder. And they also didn’t take Starbucks standards seriously at all, they only factored in their own company standards and often times got fined for it and still didn’t care. At a corporate store you get the whole culture that makes working for Starbucks so great. In my opinion working at a licensed store was like dealing with all the stresses of being a barista and none of the good stuff. Wasn’t really focused on the culture of coffee or learning about it at all. Not saying treating a licensed employee different is okay at all, but working at a licensed store is definitely different.

I work at a licensed store in a hotel. other baristas would come here and there - some are rude saying we don’t know how to make drinks even tho a couple of my coworkers also work at a corporate starbucks. every other barista I encountered both in/out of work have been nice to me and gave me discounts (and i would give them discounts if they mentioned they had a partner code). it sucks that we don’t have some perks here that corporate has but turns out i get discounted hotels, tickets, etc when traveling.