My store is experiencing mass reduction of hours because we’re not making enough $$. No idea what that means and manager just explains it as “sales are down”. Feels dumb to me. We’re not making enough because we’re understaffed, so your solution is to understaff us further….. ok. 🤥

Our executive leadership is super secretive about how labor is calculated. Every manager I know is frustrated by how difficult it is to increase labor at their store.

Labor is influenced by

- the amount of work created by the order. For example, a refresher or shaken tea earns almost no labor, where a frappuccino earns more labor.
- add ons. I know everyone on this sub shits on foam, but it's a great way to get more labor
- number of other sales. So like, an extras $100 over the course of a day won't earn you more labor, but an extra $100 in a half hour will.
- a bunch of other stuff I'm not well-informed enough about.

Waters don't earn labor

The warming button does. So does adding grinding to a bag of coffee.

It's absolutely insane. Our sales went down, because our labor literally could not support us moving orders through any faster... so then we earned less labor?! My manager (I'm an ASM, for clarity) was able to talk our DM into investing more labor into our peaks... and what to do you know, our sales increased.

So frustrating that the executive leadership, who doesn't even work in the store, doesn't give the leadership IN THE STORES the power to make their stores run efficiently.

A lie as old as time. Whatever they’re saying will increase labor won’t. “More labor” is Lucy holding the football.

Labor is incredibly detailed. It is a calculation that includes: product amount, recipe time, food time, complexity, and register transaction time. For example, let’s say a tall pike place coffee takes a barista 20 seconds to make. But the customers wants cream, now the pike place takes the barista 25 seconds to make. The customers also orders a warmed croissant which takes a total of 25 seconds to warm up and 5 seconds to bag and hand out. Let’s add the connection time at the register to 30 seconds. That entire transaction is calculated as 1 minute and 25 seconds worth of required labor. What Starbucks does is add all the transactions of a day together in this process and then looks at customer satisfaction from those orders to decide if the calculated labor necessary matches customer needs. Obviously my example is scaled down as the whole process takes significantly more time but you get the idea. So basically, if you increase customer satisfaction and increase items to a transaction then you are subsequently increasing the labour for your store. Even things like drink size do make a big difference. Another MASSIVE labour trick is to be very strict with partners ringing personal drinks and food through. It really adds up and you can gain a lot of labour hours from it

same and mobile orders count twice more than the ones we ring up towards the labor and bc of the storm that hit on sunday we have no internet ever since so we are unable to take payments and been doing force approve the whole time and they want us to stop and also we’ve been getting our ass handed to us bc we haven’t finished our summer 2 training and our labor is going down bc we have no internet for mobile orders

The labor model is my chief grievance and exactly why i will sign a union card

this is happening to us too :0

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transactions are worth more than money... but not at ANY OTHER STORE, tried to pay for work shoes with transactions and they had NO idea how much more important they were than money. Even offered peak transactions... no dice.

The more money earned, the more hours can be given.
Saying they earn more labor is just a shortcut for saying “it makes more money and we can hire/fill more spots during the day”
This is at least from my understanding as an SSV. Our store has been going through the cutting hours process for the last 2-3 months:(