Starbucks & The Fetishisation Of Corporations
Working in the service industry can be a thankless task at the best of times. With a general public that is little more than contemptuous of them at the very best of times and, within larger organisations at the very least, degrees of micro-management that border on the paranoid as a result of the ceaseless quest for a homogenised global brand, staff frequently find themselves stuck between the rock of the hopelessly unrealistic expectations of the customers that they serve and the hard place that is is the unrelenting forensic eye of their immediate superiors. And for all of this, of course, they are paid subsistence level wages, often made up with what passes for the "generosity" of said customers in the form of tipping. The irony of the fact that the work that few of the rest of us would ever want to do is also amongst the worst paid is, when viewed with any degree of removal, a striking one.
Over the course of the last twenty years or so, a new form of corporate entity has come to dominate our consciousness. These are the companies born of the post sixties generations. Their CEOs wear turtleneck sweaters and issue edicts clouded in the language of marketing meetings. They produce television adverts bathed in soothing pastel colours, with soundtracks consisting of saccharine cover versions of eighties songs performed by women with occasionally jarring child-like voices. They're at pains to remind the outside world that, hey, they're not the stiff-collared squares that you might believe them to be. They want to engineer a culture in which they're the cool friend that you probably wish you had.
Business, however, is business, and when push comes to shove these friendly, faux-folk ("fauxlk"?) music-loving, eye-contact-making global entities are just as rapacious as anybody else. Studied policies of corporate tax avoidance are de rigeur these days, as are global policies of paying as little as they can get away with, to the extent that, across the world, nations that have minimum wage laws have found that this is simultaneously the most and the least that many of these organisations, and certainly those with an interest in customer service, are prepared to pay those that are on the daily receiving end of the general public. With the best of both worlds – low wages and tax avoidance as a way of life – at their fingertips, it's unsurprising that they should post financial figures so huge that they pass beyond the realms of obscene and into the near incomprehensible.
Starbucks have, in spite of their insistence upon calling their staff "partners" (despite their minimum wages, zero hour contract pay) and having a Chief Operating Officer called Troy who
