Who Knows How Many Starbucks Workers Are on Strike?

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Dec 24, 8:15AM EST

24/7 Wall St. Key Points

Workers are on strike at hundreds of Starbucks Inc. (NASDAQ: SBUX) stores.
How big a strike and what the consequences will be remain uncertain.

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Who Knows How Many Starbucks Workers Are on Strike? — © Christopher Furlong / Getty Images News via Getty Images

A worker strike against Starbucks Inc. (NASDAQ: SBUX | SBUX Price Prediction) started in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Depending on the source, it then moved to nine states, including Colorado, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The total number of stores is in the hundreds, including 10,000 workers. Maybe.

Does It Matter?

Will Starbucks take a hit to its sales or reputation?

Workers United, which represents Starbucks workers union, said 525 stores would be affected by the walkout on Christmas Eve. The union represents people at 500 stores. The union also says that striking workers cover 300 locations. Once again, it is hard to decipher how many people are on strike and whether, as Workers United says, the number of stores affected grows daily.

The real question about the strike is how much it will affect Starbucks. It has over 16,400 stores in the United States. Based on that, a strike against a few hundred stores should not do much. While it may seem that way on the surface, it may be a bigger problem than it appears.

New Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol says he wants to return to a period of excellent customer service and strong relationships with the company’s workers. For customers, this includes faster delivery of drinks and food. It also includes returning Starbucks to a community where customers like to “mingle.” For workers, it means Starbucks will be the “best place to work” and a good one for “career opportunities.”

Workers United says that Starbucks has not resolved “more than 150 unfair-labor-practice charges on issues like retaliatory firings and cuts to hours, and because Starbucks had not offered a substantial wage increase during contract negotiations,” according to The New York Times. That seems to be counter to what Niccol says he wants. But is the 150 figure accurate? It is hard to say.

Workers are on strike at Starbucks. It is hard to determine whether this will take a bite from sales or the company’s reputation since no one is sure what the strike’s dimensions are.

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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.