Starbucks Reminds Us (And Management) That Employees Matter

Jonathan Adler, echoing David Boaz in the WSJ, complains that Starbucks has rejected customers’ efforts to personalize a Starbucks card with “laissez faire”.  Unlike “people, not profits”, a motto that the company was willing to trumpet on their cards, the idea of free markets is apparently too political for Starbucks.   Well, maybe.  It is possible that that a flock of left-wing Oberlin graduates have taken the helm over at Arroweye (the card processor) or in the Starbucks card department.  And nobody doubts that Starbucks has its share of kumbaya types in the main office.  But do we really think that Starbucks would, as an institution, choose to publicly take a stand on free market economics?  I’m a skeptic.

It looks to me like this is a good example of how entry level and mid-level employees matter.  Each day, public perceptions of Starbucks – and every other retail outlet – are shaped by the small choices made by a cashier, barrista, or other street-level employee.  And decisions made one step up the food chain – at Arroweye – are clearly putting Starbucks in hot water today.  But these choices don’t necessarily reflect corporate decisionmaking.  They certainly may reflect corporate culture, transmitted through trainings, peer to peer contacts, and other informal mechanisms.  They may reflect the sorts of people who are drawn to work at a place like Starbucks.  But I don’t attribute these decisions to management in any direct sense.

Rather, when Starbucks chose to personalize cards, they gave insufficient thought to how that process might surface exactly these sorts of problems.  And they had inadequate checks in place to insure that this type of PR meltdown would not occur.  Try as management might, individuals can do tremendous damage to an institution – from Starbucks, to airlines, to the military.  Starbucks may seem like a choice target to show how the vast, intolerant, liberal coffee elite is trying to run the country.  But perhaps it’s just more evidence of how hard it is to run a large institution and how every corporate strategy – from personalized cards to the invasion of Iraq – must be assessed, ex ante, based on realistic expectations about what a central command can fully control.