Starbucks May Pay Employees In Stock

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Dec 20, 5:50AM EST · Published Dec 19, 7:01AM EST

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Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX) may begin to pay US employees in stock if its plans in the UK are any indication. Starbucks shares have gone from $8 in March 2009 to $33 recently. The company sharply cuts costs and 12,000 workers as the recession wore on. Starbucks sales have increased substantially in the last year but it still benefits from its lower cost base.

The most immediate concern Starbucks faces are the increases in the prices of sugar and coffee which has hit record levels in the last four months.

According to the Observer:

The Seattle-based firm’s 6,700 UK staff are eligible for the shares award, which replaces a more complicated option scheme that was seen to have deterred workers of its shopworkers from taking part.

The “restricted stock units” will be handed out in January, with 50% of the award vesting at the end of the first year and the remainder released in chunks of 25% over the next two years

There is no reason to believe that the same program will not be used in the US to retain its relatively low-paid workers over a two-year period.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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.