Something that I wanted to tell every ASM and SM I had during my six years with Bux: Your partners are people, with lives, interests, dreams, and relationships that they may never bring through the doors with them. They’re not figures on an iPad diagram, they’re not numbers in the labor metric, they’re not perfect Starbucks machines who just need the right managerial pep talk to get their cogs turning just the way you want them to. And most importantly - your partners are not your stepping stone to better opportunities. Nor are they the obstacle to such.

Partners are people, who are doing their best. They have a hard, demanding job, both physically and emotionally. They’re keeping a lot of invisible balls in the air, especially now, when every interaction with the public is fraught and has the potential to make you A. sick, B. cry, or C. get screamed at for something that is probably only peripherally your fault. Working customer service sucks right now more than it ever has.

Your team just wants to be treated like people. They don’t want to be treated like a piece of machinery in the great assembly line of Starbucks, and they don’t want you to act like you’re machinery, either. Meet your team with compassion, grace, and a sense of humor. You’re a person too, so act like one. Don’t pretend to have all the answers, don’t patronize your team, and don’t parrot Starbucks-approved sound bytes at them every time they ask you for advice or whenever they need coaching. Otherwise you run the risk of your team thinking of you as a coffee automaton whose brain is a Starbucks-sponsored box full of hollow sentiments.

Almost every ASM I’ve ever had tried to be the perfect Starbucks manager 100% percent of the time, rather than a regular human manager doing the best job they could heading a team of other humans. Long story short: don’t let your job override your humanity. Thank you.

Ask “why do you do it this way?” as opposed to coming in guns blazing and telling the partners they’re doing everything wrong

Oh god I've got too much to tell my former ASM/SM in general (I'm a 257**** who quit last week abruptly) so I'll keep it brief lol

1) Work nights. Your SSVs can only do so much without an upper management presence guiding things, especially since I learned that SSVs effectively have no authority over partners.

2) Get your head out of that vat of Starbucks Koolaid. The world does not revolve around 'make the moment right' and 'assume positive intent', and the basic job of any management or supervisor is generally to take all employee interaction with a grain of salt to keep things professional.

3) I really hope you guys get caught for safety and sanitation violations and are held accountable for it, because you need to learn that there are certain standards you HAVE to follow, and not just pick and choose which ones you feel like following or not.

Also, we have shift meetings where i keep hearing about how our customer connection scores have been backsliding recently. But we as a company have been going through very abrupt(suddenly out of **all** pastries?), sharp(no fraps? We're in front of a school?!?!) and oftentimes prolonged shortages (cinnamon dolce/guava/vbh). So as an ASM/SM make sure your aware of what outages or promotions specifically pertain to demographics at your store so that there aren't unreasonable connection score expectations both for yourself and placed on other employees.

As a ssv, i feel like it would be nice to know what the weekly *allotted* man hours were for the store so that i could understand the reasoning behind how they were allocated, in order to potentially improve coverage by reallocating schedule time. Sometimes my store is busy as fuck and we legitimately don't have enough people, or we do have enough people until i have to run breaks.

Don't schedule one shift and 2 people who have never done clean plays before for the clean play. They both have to be taught all the tasks and so can only do roughly half of them. Ideally it would be a ssv, and either an experienced clean play employee and one who has never done it before, or 2 practiced clean play employees.

If possible, have 2 ssv's, one who closes (pull, counts, tills, tips, etc.) and runs the play, and one who is either extra coverage or is out of the play and just does clean play tasks the whole time and then runs the other partner(s) who are scheduled for it, while the other shift does the regular close tasks and then leaves.

Honestly… that I have a crush on them 🤣🤣. But never will they know 🤐