With rampant Covid closures lately, I have to say I’ve had numerous friends in SM positions who are telling me that they’re being put down or treated poorly (like they’re bad employees) for having to close due to isolations and quarantines. This is so far from the advertised Starbucks “brand” of caring about its partners so much and this is nothing new.

Fun story: I was a Starbucks manager. I was working in the peak of the pandemic and numerous times was berated by my DM for having partners who had been exposed to Covid, leading to reduced hours and closures. They started asking me to tell employees who were going out and doing things to not come to work, asking me to dive into their personal lives, and reprimanding me for basically not being able to control a pandemic. I explained multiple times that my partners lived in multigenerational homes with big families who all had jobs so chance of exposure was higher but it continued to be taken out on my store and it’s employees for closing. When my county reinstated masks, my DM told me to put up signs but not enforce the rule. When my employees voiced concerns for their health and safety and I brought those up, I was once again berated for trying to comply with county standards and was fed the line of Starbucks didn’t want us to have to police people (after a year plus of already doing so) and just let it be.

I also had a Black employee get into an altercation with a white woman who was making clear racist insinuations, which resulted in them both pulling their phones out. When I was asked to look into it and my Black employee informed me she felt triggered and nervously grabbed her phone in an attempt to get the woman to turn her phone off, Starbucks told me I had to fire my employee. I told them that I felt this was the wrong choice, she had told me she was triggered and was trying to come to it from a place of understanding and offered instead a final. They pushed on firing her and told me I had to “take race out of it.”

Finally, my DM fired me for using my employee discount to buy drinks for friends. A practice that everyone at Starbucks knows is widely used. When I asked if it was because I was putting up a fight against issues I disagreed with, he insisted it was the drink discount. When I asked if he was letting go of everyone who had ever done that, he said no one else did and even said he didn’t use his discount to buy his wife drinks.

I’ll tell you right now. This is just another company that only pretends for public image to care about doing what’s right and treating their employees well.