More Layoffs at Starbucks?

The Seattle Times reported on Saturday that it had gotten a hold of a memo from a local stock brokerage advising clients that Starbucks was planning another massive layoff, this time of 1,000 workers.

The move will reportedly eliminate the jobs of about one-third of Starbucks' headquarters employees and will hit some workers in the field, though no baristas will be laid off this time.

Starbucks didn't comment. Such news is hardly shocking, of course. But the Times took the opportunity to give a big chunk of the article over to a single, unnamed "East Coast store manager," who offered a disgruntled-worker's point of view—on the reign of Howard Schultz, the company's founder who returned one year ago to run the company and who has won plaudits for making tough decisions to turn the troubled company around.

To the East Coast store manager, some of those tough decisions seem more like panicked lurching, which has left "some store workers feeling whipsawed," as the Times put it.

For instance, Schultz initially decided to stop selling hot breakfast sandwiches because their smell tended to overwhelm the scent of coffee. But he quickly reversed that fairly major decision and decided to just remove cheese from the sandwiches.

Also, the company first told workers that stores would be allotted extra hours so they could brew freshly ground coffee each day, but that decision, too, was quickly reversed.

And Starbucks has made changes that make bonuses harder to earn for managers and has cut store hours, making it more difficult to keep stores clean and to train new baristas.

Workers have little say in any of this, the manager said. "They have us cornered. They know the economy is bad right now, and we can't afford to walk out."

Probably more pressing to Starbucks executives is that the bad economy has caused its fourth-quarter profits to fall by 97 percent. It will report its first-quarter results on Wednesday. Expect the news to be grim.

Starbucks spokeswoman Deb Trevino told the Times that the new initiatives, and the quick reversals of them, aren't fickleness, but rather the company being "nimble." The company, she said, needs to "take advantage of what we're learning and adjust quickly to changing business conditions."

Last week Starbucks made Fortune magazine's 100 Best Companies to Work For, coming in at No. 24. "Despite closing 600 stores and laying off 1,200 employees, Starbucks remains an attractive workplace, especially for part-timers seeking health insurance," Fortune noted.

For at least some customers, though, Starbucks is becoming less attractive as stores' resources are cut. Several comments on an item at the Starbucks Gossip blog consist of complaints that service is deteriorating.