New Starbucks CEO Makes 10,000 Times the Pay of Workers

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Aug 26, 7:11AM EDT · Published Aug 25, 7:22AM EDT

Follow 24/7 Wall St. on Google

This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

New Starbucks CEO Makes 10,000 Times the Pay of Workers — © Spencer Platt / Getty Images News via Getty Images

24/7 Wall St. Insights

The compensation of its new CEO is about 10,000 times the median pay of a Starbucks Corp. (NASDAQ: SBUX | SBUX Price Prediction) employee.
Also: 2 Dividend Legends to Hold Forever.

According to his employment letter, new Starbucks Corp. (NASDAQ: SBUX) CEO Brian Niccol gets a private office about a thousand miles from the company’s Seattle headquarters and a private jet to take him back and forth.

Perhaps the compensation formula that will trouble store workers the most is that Niccol’s compensation is about 10,000 times the median pay of a Starbucks worker. The SEC requires public companies to disclose this every year. The exact ratio will not be posted until Starbucks issues its 2024 proxy. Reuters provided the current ratio estimate.

Starbucks workers are among the lowest paid in America. According to Glassdoor, baristas can make as little as $15 an hour.

One must ask what store employees think about the Niccol pay package. Investors may believe that it will increase the price of the stock, but that does not put money into the pockets of Starbucks’ lowest-paid people. Part of the company’s turnaround is to make stores operate more efficiently.

Some Starbucks workers have started a union, and the company agreed to bargain with them earlier this year. These conversations will become more complicated when the CEO makes so much and many workers make so little.

Consumers Are Not Avoiding These Coffee Brands in 2024

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.