The New York Post reports that Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz said to a worker, “If you hate Starbucks so much, why don’t you go somewhere else?” Among other things, Schultz’s return to Starbucks is meant to slow, if not stop, the effort by some employees to form a union. The process already has started, and started successfully. The coffee shop company faces the fact that tens of thousands of its workers could become unionized and challenge what members receive in pay and other benefits. Schultz cannot stop that. The lowest-paid Starbucks workers have a point about the level of their pay.
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While Starbucks employees have good benefits, at least for people who have extremely low pay, the coffee company continues to offer wages that people can barely live on. Last year, Starbucks put its minimum hourly wage at $15. However, that may be due as much to a worker shortage as the desire for the company to pay its workers better. It remains among the lowest-paying companies in America.

Starbucks is immensely profitable, in part due to how little it pays its workers. And Schultz is a billionaire who has made most of his money from the rise in the company’s stock.

In the most recently reported quarter, Starbucks had revenue of $8.1 billion, which was up 19% from the same period the year before. Net income was $816 million, or 31% higher.

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The argument of most companies that have retail workers is that they are “unskilled” and can be paid at low levels. However, that ignores the fact that people need a modest amount of money to live on.

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