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Retail

Memo to Howard Schultz at Starbucks: Someone Will Get Hurt

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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starbucks_coffee_cup
courtesy of Starbucks
Starbucks Corp. (NASDAQ: SBUX) breaths high level food retail. The employees are well educated, well spoken and well mannered. The stores are clean, even down to the restrooms. However, there is one thing that causes a threat to many customers, and it is not food quality or handling. It is the computer and cell phone charger cords that often stretch from the walls, across aisles and on to remote tables.

Is Starbucks liable if someone trips over a cord and gets hurt? Good question, since the hazard is easy for employees to see — and stop.

One of the oddities of the electric cord hazard is that it is rarely seen in places like McDonald’s Corp. (NYSE: MCD) or Pizza Hut. Perhaps people do not stay as long in these stores, or do not bring books and business presentations to study for college or get ready for meetings. Perhaps McDonald’s stores are rarely used for meetings at all.

If Starbucks management has any question about the threat, there are plenty of examples of safety literature both from public and private sources about the danger of tripping over exposed cords. Someone should warn Howard Schultz.

Photo of 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.

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