Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month | Hacker News Reader

Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month

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362 pointszvonimirs339 comments

Ron Johnson used to do this when he headed Apple retail. Would just go into a store totally undercover to the customers (obviously staff would recognize him) and work for a bit.

Occasionally fairly major changes, both to the staff side and to the customer experience, were made based on his visits.

I don't recall ever seeing a press announcement about it. Saying you're doing it to win brownie points sure makes it seem inauthentic. Then again maybe it's better this way than leaking it to a reporter and pretending that it was discovered organically. Guess we'll have to wait and see if anything actually comes out of it to know if it's just a stunt, but I'd put my money on it.

> Occasionally fairly major changes

like what? I'm curious. There's nothing that shows the flaws of a process like running it yourself.

Probably better to just listen to the people that do it all day than to think you pop in as an outsider and have some special insight.

Any human in the world will believe someone if they experience for themselves. Sometimes it's necessary.

Possibly so, but the man was one of the best salespeople I've ever met. Ice-to-eskimos level, all while being completely genuine. He had a genuine interest in and deep understanding of the customer experience and was easily the equal of any full-time sales staff.

When it came to the areas he wasn't as comfortable in, say the genius bar, he still deeply understood the customer experience, but never tried to do the job if he wasn't able.

Boy, I'm coming off like a fanboy here... It was just a truly impressive and inspiring thing to see as one of the regular employees. If I worked at Starbucks it's what I'd want to see, not some propped-up press tour.

Reminds me of seeing the chairman of a major fashion label do the same thing - dude was so slick, saw him sell the hell out of the place to 3 women before I left.

Disagree. Experiencing something yourself is a whole nother ballgame from being told about it. "You can't tell people anything" [0]. Recognizing this applies to oneself shows intellectual humility IMO.

[0] http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-an...

People need performance and narrative.

Spending one day a month so you can say to fellow executives "I actually went and touched the problem, we need to fix it" and so employees can say to each other "he actually came and touched the problem, he must be working on fixing it" has real value.

Actually learning about the problem and coming up with a solution is best done by listening to the people like you said, but there's a role for the other thing too.

You're describing an incredibly toxic environment. Executives blowing each other off, employees not trusting executives, executives not considering a problem real until they've seen it themselves. All of this is a crutch in place of actual trust.

Yes, I realize this toxic environment is present in 95% of all companies in the U.S. That makes it worse, not better.

I don't know if toxic is the word for it. No human has infinite capacity for logic or empathy.

Being conscientious takes effort almost by definition. All of us need reminders to put that effort in.

That's why people talk about "getting a seat at the table." If you are physically in a room with someone and they hear your voice and see your face you become more real to them.

We face a choice of either denying the messy parts of human nature (and seeing how that goes) or adapting our processes to account for them.

> Executives blowing each other off, employees not trusting executives, executives not considering a problem real until they've seen it themselves. All of this is a crutch in place of actual trust.

You could apply this to literally 99% of any employer in the world.

> You're describing an incredibly toxic environment. Executives blowing each other off, employees not trusting executives, executives not considering a problem real until they've seen it themselves. All of this is a crutch in place of actual trust.

That's kind of the problem that Starbucks is having right now.

Or rather, it's a symptom of the war its executives are waging on its employees. The former are going to need to do a hell of a lot more then a shift a month to rebuild that trust.

Why not both?

That would work, if Starbucks had that kind of a culture, but they don't.

It is a good way to get exposed to the baristas once a month. When I was a barista there, I saw my manager's manager a few times. I think I knew the name of that person's manager? I think there's at least 2 more layers before the executive in charge of all of the stores.

This is the most direct way of accomplishing that.

pricing stuff, metrics stuff, customer flow changes. Real day-to-day stuff.

One of the ones I personally witnessed related to the services that salespeople were expected to sell along with the computers. There was some kerfuffle going on about stores not meeting the expected "attach rates". He spent a whole day selling computers, and could not meet the expected attach rates himself. Couple weeks after that changes to pricing and program benefits were announced. I later learned that the need for changes had become a very high priority the same day as his visit.

There are a whole class of problems that fall into the "seems like a good idea/measure at some management level, based on the data and worldview they have, but fail in reality, due to some detail at the ground level" category.

Or, consequences of lossy compression as information gets summarized before being transmitted up the management ladder.

And it isn't always a bad management call! Sometimes they're making the right call on the data they have, but they're missing critical data.

E.g. Not realizing that 1/5 a store needs to be used for ad hoc inventory because too much product was flooded during holidays, ergo it cannibalizes display space, ergo the sales rates of various SKUs are all out of whack (to come up with a contrived example)

Sure, the decisions by management may make sense based on the data they have, but how stupid are management that they trust information filtered through layers of underlings?

I get it, at some point you have to admit that you're not going to get 100% truth from people. But that doesn't mean you don't talk to different people at different layers of the company.

It's not 100% truth -- it's that you can't even get 100% detail.

This clip always resonated with me, re: high level leadership: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gguxM8eABP8 (as context, one subordinate he's talking about is presented as a terrible leader, the other as a great one)

Specifically, the point being made that all information is... uncertain. And how a good leader makes good decisions within that uncertainty, instead of picking winners.

It's easy to make the right decision when you have all the facts, but you can't have all the facts when you need to make 15+ decisions in a day.

I feel like this just highlights the incompetence of executives and management at various levels more than anything else.

The only solution was to take an entire day from the CEO to figure out that the goals were unrealistic? Wasn't the very first clue that stores were generally unable to meet the expected attach rates?

It just highlights this dumb idea that executives are these ungodly force multipliers. I bet if anyone had bothered to ask the day-to-day labor about the proposed attach rates (and actually listened) they wouldn't have had to burn a day's worth of CEO compensation to figure out they weren't achievable.

I wonder if he did the same thing at JC Penny when he was running it into the ground.

In his defense shoppers wanting stuff to appear to be on sale is pretty dumb.

Using an incorrect model of your clientele’s behavior and emotional responses is even dumber.

Of course, I would have made the same mistake as Johnson. But it is always a good reminder of how differently people’s brains work.

The hardest thing for that was that for him to succeed he really needed to play the long game. JCP was and still is eternally screwed. Mall retail is pretty much doomed to die and the ever increasing sale ratios are a side effect of attempts to 'growth hack' their way out of the inevitable. The fact of the matter was that JCP was more expensive than Walmart for, effectively most of their main brands, the same product. Sales allowed JCP to pretend their product is 'worth more'. The problem became a race to the bottom though. Once you say a store-brand Polo should cost '$69.99' but is on sale for $24.99, you start to tell your customer "Our products are overpriced." As ultimately, your product still is more expensive than the $14.99 Walmart product.

By removing the price war, pricing their product at value. You now can compete on a more simple message of quality: "Our product is worth $10 more because X". The best part of this is...that's exactly what Walmart is actually doing. Walmart is actually rather sale-resistant and they frame it as a 'rollback' rather than X% off. Walmart's message is purely the regular price, not the value.

The issue you of course run into for JCP though, is in the interm, as the market changes, you need to throw a bunch quarters made up of that built up growth hacking debt of ever increasing sales in the trash. That just won't fly on Wall st.

What JCP really need is a reboot though, they are doomed either way due to their leases. Organizationally, I would be trying to get rid of those as fast as possible and get into outdoors small-medium retail. They have a great brand but have insanely expensive locations.

I didn't see it that way. He took a big swing to do something different and was fired less than two years into it. Maybe you could argue that he was straining against something too strong to overcome or misapplying his lessons from a higher-margin brand, but it's also possible to say that he wasn't given enough time to see it through.

It's like if someone would have taken over Kodak at the turn of the century to go all-in on digital. It would have hurt the company in the short term and kicked against their core business but maybe they would have come out on the other side better off. Impossible to say if the scenario isn't allowed to happen.

His tenure coincides with the beginning of the decline of department stores in general, so you'd have to show that JCPenney fared uniquely worse to say that he ran it into the ground. It still exists, unlike Lord and Taylor and Sears. Doesn't seem to have fared much worse than Macy's, though I didn't do a ton of research here.

Yes, we don't actually know whether it would have worked. He said upfront that it would need more time; apparently he didn't manage upward effectively enough and for some reason the board didn't feel desperate enough to give him more runway.

Department stores had already been declining for a long time before he came along, though.

Was he the guy who promised to make their pricing easier to understand with clearly labelled discounts without coupons? He is. Then he probably did spend time in a store because confusion over sales and extra time at checkout were common at JC Penney. His plan would have made the shopping experience less complicated.

The problem is it didn't translate into improved performance. The opposite actually. Because what customers say and what customers do aren't always the same thing. They may complain that there are too many coupons. But when given the choice they preferred using coupons.

So he got sacked and JC Penney went back to the old pricing scheme. By becoming even more risk-averse no one after him even tried to pull the company out of its death spiral. In hindsight the plan would never have succeeded because the customers who would have appreciated the simpler pricing had already left. The JCP shoppers at that time were coupon hunters who resented the changes. He ignored the existing customers while chasing ex-customers who didn't want to return.

Why is why the user experience of Apple Retail has gone downhill after he left and Steve Jobs passed away.

From CEO of Dixon, to CEO of Burberry and finally Apple veteran, Deirdre O'Brien. The improvement she made was like many of the recent Mac changes, reverting back to old design.

Ahrendts (of Burberry) was such a weird choice, unless Apple's goal at the time was to maximize in-person watch band sales.

Seems Tim eventually realized selling luxury trench coats isn't very similar to premium computer hardware/software. Meanwhile investors had to pay nearly $200 Million in comp for the privilege of her leading this "town square" fantasy (not sure I'd ever consider a store in the mall a community fixture) while ignoring the internet exists.

Would have rather put ChatGPT in charge of the stores and spent that $200M on improving the software that a Billion Apple users spend time with every day.

Form over function. It's what Apple does.

> “Saying you're doing it to win brownie points sure makes it seem inauthentic.”

Starbucks doesn’t have a good track record for replacement CEO for Howard Schultz (founder/CEO).

So I’m sure these kind of announcements is to instill confidence with Wall Street that this CEO will work out.

>obviously staff would recognize him

I think it's probable that they wouldn't.

In the bay area, where "oh god, corporate is in the building" is a way of life and common thing you bet they would.

Outside the bay area, eh, 50/50, you're right.

100% chance that the regional corporate staff gets notice this is happening and goes on a panicked 48-hour cleanup drill to make sure the store is spotless for the incoming exec and make sure the grumpier members of staff are given the weekend off.

Once again, outside the bay area: absolutely true.

In the bay area though, that was just Thursday. No warning, could and did happen any time.

The difference was incredibly stark. I wonder if that's true for Starbucks in Seattle.

Reminds me when I was a bank teller - the area manager would come into our branch sometimes trying to like disguise himself...? But it was always SO obvious after about 10 seconds that it was him while he'd sit in the lobby and observe.

It was also impressive how fast word would go down the teller line that "corporate" was in the branch and everyone would sort of shape up for the hour they were around.

These "king gets wisdom from dressing as regular person" stories are great, and it's definitely a great idea for higher level folks to sample the ground truth themselves on a regular basis. CEOs are at a real danger of being surrounded by yes-men, and it's very possible that through conditioning and repetition they might actually start believing insane corporate positions.

However, there's a real smell of something going wrong from them as well. The CEO working a single shift noticed something that needed to be changed? Why? Did none of the thousands of workers who work those shifts every day notice that problem? Did they have no way to report it? Did those reports not get evaluated properly? Was there a manager in charge of the stores who did not notice the problem? Sure, fixing the problem is great, but if the CEO needs to personally witness the issue for it to get fixed, then there must be thousands of other issues not being fixed.

Your last paragraph has a valid point, and the outcome of such a visit can simply be that: There are ideas, but for some reasons, they don't make it to the higher levels. Let's find out why!

That problem is exacerbated in this case by the difference between "retail", "retail corporate" and "corporate". The fact the that anything coming from the frontline employees not only had to work it's way up to retail leadership, but then to essentially an entirely different corporation's leadership makes it nearly impossible for ideas that require action by "corporate" to trickle all the way up.

The CEO can easily see problems that the line workers don't see as problems.

For example, I happily programmed in C for many years while not even noticing severe problems with the language. Later broader experience with other languages led me to wonder why I didn't see the problems with C before, even though they were negatively affecting my work.

For a small example:

    S s;
    S *p;

To read a field:

    s.field
    p->field

It turns out that there's no ambiguity in using `.` for both `.` and `->`. Both can be:

    s.field
    p.field

But what's the problem with `->`? It's when you want to refactor the code to switch between a value to a reference. If `.` is used for both, just change the typedef and maybe a couple places. With `.` and `->`, there are maybe thousands of tedious changes to make in the code base. The inevitable result of this is you're not going to attempt such a refactor, as it's too much work. The code stays in the way it was originally designed.

I was able to see this only via broader experience with other languages. I never even noticed the issue before.

C++ addressed this not by fixing it, but by introducing the reference type. But the C++ ref type brings along with it all kinds of new problems, which I won't get into here.

> switch between a value to a reference

your language is too sloppy for me, a pointer-to-a-struct contains a value (could say "is" a value), and some struct-members might resolve as values, but a switch from a struct to a pointer-to-a-struct is not a switch between a value and a reference; while you might call a pointer "a reference", a struct is never a value. Or did you mean a "dot" r-value and a "dereference to an" r-value? This all makes a difference because C is a call-by-value language, and you can't pass a struct, so it's an important distinction to maintain.

This kind of change might be something a student or newb might encounter, but an experienced C programmer is going to have a sense from the start whether to go with a static/local struct or a malloc'ed one. Maybe on more common a struct containing a struct might switch to a struct containing a pointer to another struct.

personally, I use hungarian and ps->x vs s.x is a nice reinforcement of what hungarian is trying to reinforce. Using parenthesis to illustrate a sort of precedence, I guess I associate the (pointer->) like that as opposed to the (.member) though I can't defend that as making an inordinate amount of sense :)

> an experienced C programmer is going to have a sense from the start whether to go with a static/local struct or a malloc'ed one

In my and others' extensive experience in C, almost everyone is wrong about where their programs are consuming time. Profiling almost always produces surprising results. Being about to easily refactor programs to experiment with different data organizations is a superpower for a language.

C programs are difficult to refactor, and so they tend to persist with their earliest design decisions despite changing requirements and profile results.

The workers might be distracted by other problems that are literally impossible for the CEO to even simulate, like food insecurity, housing instability, looming medical bankruptcy, etc. I bet the CEO is able to be a much more productive barista without spending company time worrying about those things!

If the CEO is spending a shift working on the line, he still has all his CEO responsibilities to worry about. Those are 24/7, they never stop.

Of course of those problems become too much for the CEO they can always quit.

Well for companies as large as Starbucks, I think most of those responsibilities come down to picking the nicest place for a three martini lunch.

The CEO has the same advantage a new person has coming onto the job and seeing problems.

As soon as you have been in a place 3 or 6 months you are used to all the workarounds and the reasons why things can't be done.

The CEO is just a superior human capable of things others can only dream of.

The CEO should have incredible hustle and ownership, breath of experience, ability to see second order effects in both the business and the market, ability to predict the business environment in the short and long term, ability to plan changes strategically, ability to judge how areas of the business are functioning or impaired, etc.

The job of the CEO is to know as much as possible and take responsibility for it.

That doesn't always happen, but it should.

> Sure, fixing the problem is great, but if the CEO needs to personally witness the issue for it to get fixed, then there must be thousands of other issues not being fixed.

If they have a good CEO, they will realize there is an issue with the reporting system and fix that. If not, at least the glaring issue gets resolved, and perhaps someone else is able to use this as evidence to improve the reporting system in the future.

I like your last paragraph a lot, one reason in my experience as to why a problem didn't get reported/fixed is that employees are unfortunately rarely rewarded for fixing processes in large structures (or just once, when the fix itself improves the productivity in a lasting manner).

So a real blocker in my opinion is that there is no clear incentive structure to even think or care about a fix in the first place.

The CEO will care much more about it because their compensation/position is essentially tied to improving this side of the business.

There can also be a lot of what I'll call "political inertia" involved.

In my experience, the existing process has a way of appearing invisible such that any change will feel like more work, even when it isn't. It's hard to improve things when your coworkers perceive you as trying to give them more work.

Agreed. The ideal scheme would be anonymous reporting + objective third party prioritization + financial compensation if benefits realized.

The lack of compensation always baffled me. If an employee comes up with a change that saves the company $x, why don't they get bonused <$x for the year? Win/win.

Make it subject to approval or somesuch, to prevent gaming and weed out edge cases, but every employee should be incentivized to find a way to do their job better.

You aren't paid based off the value you provide. Companies don't know how to measure that anyways. Your salary is based off of how expensive it would be to replace you.

But in this case the measure is clear.

Sales is another job where value is very clear, hence good sales people are often some of the highest paid people in a company.

Value > Salary >= Replacement Cost

Companies can ignore that for awhile, but eventually it needs to be true.

There can even be an opposite incentive, where fixing an issue that was wasting time means more or different work is assigned to everyone

Sure, fixing the problem is great, but if the CEO needs to personally witness the issue for it to get fixed, then there must be thousands of other issues not being fixed.

Keep in mind in a corporation like Starbucks, the CEO is likely a hundred or more levels removed from the daily operations of a cafe. That's a lot of internal politics for even a motivated regional manager to navigate.

>> Keep in mind in a corporation like Starbucks, the CEO is likely a hundred or more levels removed from the daily operations of a cafe.

Really? You think there's a hundred or more executives/managers/supervisors between the CEO and someone on the floor of a SBUX? I'd bet closer to 10.

This is an example of calling someone out for a misstatement that does not change the meaning of their message, and so was probably not necessary to make.

I'd bet closer to six (6), and that can probably be verified (or at least ballparked) by looking at some of their SEC and other disclosures like franchise info.

But that's just direct bosses-boss levels. Doesn't take into consideration things like... PMs, suppliers, customers, Health & Safety (which will vary by locale), unions, security, accounting, HR, public relations & the media, the board of directors, and all of the myriad depts. that will pop up in odd or varied ways.

Maybe not 100 levels, but certainly dozens and dozens of interested parties.

If a manager at each level oversees only two unique people, then an organization with 100 levels has 2^99 + 1 (~a quadrillion quadrillion) employees.

Your point being?

/sarcasm

Even if the problems get reported, this helps the CEO get insight into how to prioritize fixing them, how much to invest in doing so, etc.

It's like observability versus debugging.

Sure, ideally you can get all your actionable information from your metrics, but in reality sometimes to understand what's really happening you just need to step through the code one statement at a time.

The current king of Jordan used to dress as a regular person and ride public transportation. Not sure if to get wisdom or popularity.

> Was there a manager in charge of the stores who did not notice the problem?

Probably. But there are often three to six layers of filters between the CEO and a service worker. Those managers may not see the effect of a small problem across the entire system. Sometimes those managers have incentive to hide problems to protect their bonus. Other times, the problem seems unimportant. In Starbucks case, a company with a great employer reputation is suddenly facing unionization, so there is a problem there. Unions don't happen because employees are happy.

> if the CEO needs to personally witness the issue for it to get fixed, then there must be thousands of other issues not being fixed.

In retail, nothing reveals subtle and not so subtle issues faster than being at the point of interaction with customers. Things that might look great on paper or sound good in a meeting at corporate sometimes aren't a good idea. Also, what works in one region, or even at a store across town, might now work well in another. You won't see any of this from a board room or flying in a Gulfstream.

Agreed. I love these people that think that hierarchy is a substitute. It’s the only way to scale but it misses a lot. Talking and actually understanding cross-cutting issues or solvable pain points is the only way. Most people don’t take on a sense of ownership and they infect a culture into being too conservative (which management also encourages because as you get bigger mistakes get amplified).

>But there are often three to six layers of filters between the CEO and a service worker.

In my experience, each layer also tends to lessen the severity/criticality. Even when everyone is well intentioned and truthful, you end up with a lot different story/description when it reaches the end of the chain.

> Sometimes those managers have incentive to hide problems to protect their bonus.

I guess one important thing to look out for to judge this as either a PR stunt, or an actual well meaning practice - will be toi see if store managers get any advance notice that the CEO is gonna be working there.

If an ambitious career oriented manager knows the boss is gonna see everything that hopes on tomorrow, you can bet there's be extra staff rostered on the day before to make sure everything is better-that-normally prepped for the next day, that all the most compliant staff and the staff who are most beholden to the manager will be rostered on and they'll all be coached about what to say and threatened if they say the wrong thing, and probably a whole bunch of friends of the manager will show up as stooges on the day cosplaying happy and satisfied "ordinary customers".

> The CEO working a single shift noticed something that needed to be changed? Did none of the thousands of workers who work those shifts every day notice that problem?

Obviously, he's much more intelligent than all those other people, that's why he's the CEO and way richer than them. Rich people are more intelligent and better than poor people in most aspects. That's why the laws favor them.

I understand that your post is sarcasm, but it does bring up the underlying issue of who's been empowered to make changes, and ultimately, who's had (correctly or incorrectly) trust placed in them.

An interesting thing happened at a company I worked for: the engineers were, during a time of intense labor pressure, asked to staff the fulfillment center. The fulfillment staff worked under a supervisor, and were supposed to perform the same rote tasks all day long: hook this device up to the bench, pack this box, unpack that box, and so on. The engineers worked under their engineering managers, and were supposed to perform the _exact samesame_ rote tasks all day: configure devices, pack and unpack boxes.

What really happened was that the engineers found all sorts of ways to optimize the process as they went - and they made them largely without asking anybody. They then shared the optimizations with the other engineers, who followed suit. And they were rewarded by engineering management for finding those optimizations. Later, they propagated back down to the supervisors, who propagated them down to the fulfillment staff.

If the fulfillment staff deviated from their rote tasks, though? They'd have most likely been fired.

This _might_ not be Amazon.

But it sure as hell sounds like exactly the sort of thing that would have happened at Amazon.

(And, as a plot twist, those same engineers went back to their coding jobs earning 8 or 10 times what the fulfilment staff make, and started on a project using machine vision to algorithmically detect "rote task violations" and have the computer fire people for them...)

I can say that this was not Amazon.

I've actually been in this situation. In a past life I was a programmer at a t-shirt printing company. On their first day at the company everyone worked on the line for ~4 hours. I was picking and printing t-shirts on the factory floor. I was able to see how things worked and how they didn't.

But the major factor is I wasn't scared to make or suggest changes in how I worked. Everyone else on the line needed that t-shirt printing job so they just did what they were told. I wasn't afraid of being fired or reprimanded for making changes so I was much more free with my words and work.

"CEO does a day of actual work" is great if it helps the CEO better understand quotidian business process and customer needs.

It is a sham when it's used to counter disagreements from employees.

It happens. Imagine the duty manager has to spend 30 minutes each shift sorting out inventory paperwork because the system is old and slow.

Nobody at the store has any influence, the area managers complain but the project for the new system is low priority.

The CEO has the ability to see that this is a problem and the project needs increased priority.

>Was there a manager in charge of the stores who did not notice the problem?

Along similar lines why did the manager's manager not notice the problem? IF the CEO can spend time investigating how the lowest tier workers operate, surely every manager can spend time looking at the tier of workers below his immediate tier.

It could be that working in the store for a day is a good way to get candid and unfiltered input from those workers and managers.

Agreed that information should flow up the chain freely, but there are a lot of incentives working against that, some of which are just human nature (e.g. desire to fix the problems in one's own backyard without escalating.)

> It could be that working in the store for a day is a good way to get candid and unfiltered input from those workers and managers.

Yeah, nah.

Can you imagine any low level AppleStore worker giving Steve Jobs "candid and unfiltered input"???

If that's what you're after, you don't send in a very public top-of-the-org-chart face. At least not in any place with at-will (or right-to-work, whichever it is?) employment laws, where they could fire you on the spot for no reason at all. (Most likely not the CEO doing the firing, but the workers direct or one up or regional manager - who'd just been shown up as worthy of "candid and unfiltered input")

WestJet, Canada's second largest airline, used to do this a lot. I remember handing my coffee cup and trash to Clive Beddoe, one of the original founders, with a double take. They were largely employee-owned and it showed. Then they went public, grew on the backs of shareholders and were taken private again by PE. Now they're worse than Air Canada, the former poster child for terrible airlines.

When a company is young and wants to engage employees I think this type of signaling can work great. When you're the established, mature incumbent and your employees feel they need to unionize to get fair treatment, this is a stunt for the public and not going to change anything internal.

AC gets a lot of undeserved hate. They're better than all the US airlines, without exception and they're on par with a lot of continental European airlines. Much better than BA. There's things they could do better for sure, but onboard service, seats, lounges, ground staff - all solid. Huge improvements to Aeroplan after they bought it back.

After a lot of bouncing around the US it's a treat to fly. I feel like hating on them is something of a Canadian pastime.

Reverse Anecdote: I've had a lot of bad experiences w/ AC, though they generally do better than AA or Delta.

I'll also give AC credit: they have to fly a lot of not great routes as a national mandate, and that means cutting corners to make things profitable; the challenges of flag carriers, etc. etc.

Jeff Bezos used to do similar with Customer Support. He'd meet up with someone in customer support, and shadow their calls for the day. A number of features came out from it, like the ability for customer support to "pull an andon cord" and immediately yank a product from sale pending investigation by senior support staff. It came about because the customer support rep anticipated all of the problems a customer was having with a particular product on a call. "We see this all the time with that product". That annoyed Jeff. There was wisdom, people seeing ways customers were having a bad experience, and they were powerless to do anything about it.

Many years ago I did a few short weeks on an engagement at Wynn casino in Vegas. It overlapped with Christmas time and I was invited to a holiday dinner, which had several thousand people rotate through the huge conference room ballroom over an entire day. Everyone from casino from the dealers to cleaners and cashiers - and even us contractors - rotated through. It was very nice while also yet another unmemorable catered event. It would have remained unmemorable for me except for this part. Someone later asked me if I had some cake, and I said yeah, I went by the cake table and some guy in pink shirt served me a slice, I asked for a small one and he took care of it. Well, apparently that was Steve Wynn, the owners, he I guess did that at the holiday dinner, meeting everyone in a marathon session. I don't know if that is still true but I thought that was a nice way to meet everyone eye to eye.

I recall Amazon used to do something similar. Executives would sometimes take customer service shifts. The goal isn't PR or worker morale - most people see through stunts like that. The real goal is to help leaders better understand their product, its problems, and customer frustrations.

I think a week in warehouse might do good for them. Or as delivery driving...

I worked at a small (in Amazon scale - still the largest in the country) home grocery delivery service and everyone pre corona had to spend their 2 first weeks in the warehouse. Everyone had done it, including managers and c-level

I figure that's a much better place to work than an Amazon warehouse then?

The couple of people I personally know that have worked at Amazon warehouses says they're pretty well ran in comparison to other warehouses.

And I know personally that my experience working in a small-business warehouse back when I was young was absolutely garbage. Smaller businesses rarely get any news coverage, but I worked in a warehouse with zero ventilation, no safety training, no safety equipment, nobody trained in logistics, broken and improper lifting equipment, etc. This is par for the course at a workplace with zero outside scrutiny.

Amazon warehouses are at least run by professionals in logistics, have proper safety procedures, equipment, training, etc. As I understand, the 'bad' part is the volume. But at the end of the day, even a well-run warehouse job is a warehouse job. It is physical work.

Historically I think they all did around the Christmas rush but probably not so much any more.

In the UK I did some work with HMV doing Dev work on their stock systems.

Similar situation where they would send everyone in the company to work in the store, so you would actually use the system you've developed in the real world and understand why everyone always hates the software.

They want them to understand customer frustrations, not employee devastation. Plus, make the C-suite realize how they treat the "lowest" employees of the company and they might not want to work there anymore, have to tread carefully there.

Ignorance is bliss, very mature strategy

My first career was a chef. When I asked a friend of the family who owned a restaurant when I was teenager what steps I should take to become a chef, the advice he gave was "Get a job as a dishwasher in a restaurant because the most important thing you need to know is to respect your dishwasher because anytime everything goes wrong and you are in a jam, it is your dishwasher who will save you." Unknown to me the restaurant that hired me when I was 17 as a dishwasher was also one of the most prestigious restaurants in California in the early 90s which lead to years cooking in Michelin Star restaurants. Good advice.

Reminds me of something that my father told me: "Always be nice to nurses and janitors. Nurses run hospitals. Janitors run buildings. Secretaries run offices."

It is basically the bottom half of the triangle that runs everything, anything else are mostly management.

Right.

In the case of offices, the receptionist is the most important and powerful person there. They are the ones who have the ear of everybody else, have control of access to everyone else, know how things really work (as opposed to how everyone says they work), etc.

A good or bad word from the receptionist can literally make or break business deals.

Can you elaborate a bit on how the dishwasher role gets the restaurant out of jams?

Can’t cook if your tools aren’t clean?

I'm not certain I'd pay the bill for an expensive meal were it served on grubby crockery.

If it's anything like the small, dinky restaurant i washed plates for, the reality is that the restaurant doesn't have enough plates and pans to satisfy every order on a busy night without washing something. Pans in particular are reused multiple times during a shift, and they better be well-scrubbed, because you don't want your fancy ingredients tasting of something else.

A line cook can't stop what they are doing for even 5 minutes during a 4 hour period of time. There might be a lull for 15 minutes between seatings to run to the bathroom, but sometimes not. It is brutal work. Because of the thin margins in restaurants, they tend to be under staffed. When something needs to be fixed during service, maybe a plumbing problem, the ice machine broke, or a purveyor didn't deliver the correct items so someone needs to run to the supermarket, it is usually the dishwasher who fixes the problem. The pay is awful for a dishwasher. Likely, especially in California, the dishwasher in the restaurant you are eating at isn't legally allowed to be in the United States. Other times, the dishwasher will have a criminal record and can't find other work. Another dishwasher in Portland had his entire face tattooed with body modifications. They are in that position for a reason. The point is paying the dishwasher in respect if not higher wages is important to the survival of a restaurant. A chef depends on this person who is in the lowest social position to have his or her back.

Jeff Wilke (former ceo of amazon retail) used to do that during Q4 peak. It was also pretty common for engineering teams to signup to do a day in the FC so they could see what it was like.

Bezos would do one day a year operating the customer service lines.

It also helps leadership understand employee frustrations, which translates into improved customer experience.

Absolutely! And that's what leaders should be doing.

In this documentary about Kawasaki, they also mention that everyone has to expend some time in the production line, it seems like a great way to motivate your engineers to improve the process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg32DlveFiE

IIRC McDonalds still does this for some subset of its corporate workforce.

I know of several restaurant chains who do this - it's seen as very important for restaurant head office workers to understand exactly how the restaurants work and the problems that they experience.

And depending on the franchise owner, could also be the franchise.

My first McJob was at an owner-operated McDonalds where the owner would roll in at lunch on a Saturday in his BMW Z4, see the lunch rush, wash his hands, throw on some gloves, and call out to turn on the other side of the grill for assembly and start packing orders himself on that side to help out the workload.

Gained a lot of respect as an impressionable young adult on what a good leader looks like at that job because his efforts trickled down to his store manager and the managers underneath them.

I don't know if it's still the case but you used to have to go to Hamburger U before you could own a McD's so you knew how to do the job. I actually see it all the time and you can always tell who the owner is, instead of some really uninterested 17 year old you get a middle aged man in a pressed (insert fast food name) polo who is super happy to take your order.

HU is still mandatory, though I didn't feel it was that challenging. A lot of rote memorization basically.

Our Owner/operator was a former bicycle salesman who knew hot fries, and that was it. I wouldn't say he was hands off (he insisted that I violate civil rights/labor laws may he rot in hell), but he really didn't understand much more than squeezing out every penny.

The worst thing was that Ray Kroc's wife live in the next town over and routinely came through our drive thru. Once the lot was being re-surfaced and she was royally pissed that the drive thru was closed and she had to come inside and mingle with the hoi polloi.

Apparently this is why some of the McDonalds restaurants in the Oak Brook / Chicago area are very good (or at least perfectly to spec)... they are owned by corporate and used for executive training.

That is the most expensive McDonalds I've ever been too.

Waffle House also required you to work in a restaurant for some time before they'll let you buy a franchise.

> Executives would sometimes take customer service shifts.

This won't happen among most companies, but I'd love to see that become a common practice with at least some high-level developers.

There's so many pain points in many customer service organizations that are easily solvable if a developer understood the frustration and waste with many customer service tasks. Nothing motivates more than having to do some annoying manual billing process that's error prone or looking up customer information by logging into 5 different systems.

Alas, Google has no customer service, so their developers shall be placed in the void until morale improves.

When i started at Shopify we had to setup a store and do some customer support. It was a great way to understand the product, especially since my role wasn't going to be customer facing at all.

This should absolutely be a thing for vertical integration developers. If you're developing cashier software for Target, you should have to use it under realistic circumstances sometimes. Same for Amazon driving software, helpdesk software, sales, etc.

When I worked for a large logistics company we’d have a few days a year where we’d go downstairs and shadow someone using our software. It was very informative. The UX people were redesigning workflow to be “easier” and less information dense and the experienced people (who worked mostly on commissions mind you) where very pissed and wanted their hot keys and their at a glance information.

It was very eye opening.

>The UX people were redesigning workflow to be “easier” and less information dense and the experienced people (who worked mostly on commissions mind you) where very pissed and wanted their hot keys and their at a glance information.

That doesn't necessarily mean that the UX people were wrong though. Even if their changes made the experienced people slightly slower, it could be worth it if it significantly sped up onboarding.

You only onboard someone once. In theory, that person will have to be using the system every day for years.

Why optimize for the one-time thing at the expense of the everyday use?

The math isn't straightforward. With a high enough rate of churn, there can be more onboarding work hours than post-onboarding work hours, especially if the onboarding ramp up time takes a while (as it presumably would if you only optimized for experienced use). And high rates of churn are not exactly uncommon.

Also, everybody goes through onboarding, and initial impressions have a lot of power. It's pretty easy to create a system that everyone hates just because it's a little difficult during onboarding. Social reinforcement can be stronger than reality.

(Personally, I still lean towards optimizing for experienced use, if you can do it without sacrificing the onboarding experience too much. Hotkeys that the new employee never needs to see or know about are a typical example, though I prefer a smoother ramp by mentioning the key on applicable menu items. The newbie can ignore it, the intermediate user can learn from it, the experienced user can ignore the menu.)

I suppose that the Devil's Advocate sort of counterargument is that for many startups or businesses on the bubble of survival, their most important task is for paying customers to understand the basics of their software and get hooked with a paid subscription quickly. From that perspective, it's ok if customers don't absolutely LOVE the software in a year or two, as long as they like it just enough to be paying today.

Perhaps, but I have no sympathy for companies using that business model.

> Why optimize for the one-time thing at the expense of the everyday use?

I'm not necessarily endorsing this perspective, and it depends on the specifics, but there are cases where this makes business sense. If you take a task that requires an expensive expert and make it something that an unskilled worker can do then you you can lower overall labor costs even if each user is less efficient in the new system.

It's a bit more complicated than that. Here's a great article that explains how users can be sorted into categories (from beginner to student to expert) and what each of them wants and needs.

https://breakingpoint.substack.com/p/your-three-kinds-of-cus...

It is possible to achieve both. Making an explicit choice to degrade the ability and satisfaction of experienced employees is just optimizing for staff churn.

> The UX people were redesigning workflow to be “easier” and less information dense and the experienced people (who worked mostly on commissions mind you) where very pissed and wanted their hot keys and their at a glance information. It was very eye opening.

Just curious. Many applications have some kind of "Settings" or "Preferences" section with some kind of App UI customization being possible. Often it's just a set of fairly simple features like picking a favorite background color for your App or being able to upload your own avatar or something.

But are there Apps out there where you can pick between say "Beginner and Expert" modes and have a radically different UI and UX depending on how experienced and comfortable you are? (Gmail sort of has a touch of that concept with the ability to either have a dense or comfortable email layout, but that's barely scratching the surface of what's possible)

PS: I realize that trying to develop, maintain, and support mobile and desktop versions of different versions of the same App would morph into a significant and unpleasant challenge, but being able to pick the type of UI might be a possible solution that pleases more types of users.

> But are there Apps out there where you can pick between say "Beginner and Expert" modes

Yes, plenty. They've never been particularly popular, because they tend to impose an "all or nothing" switch to the user: by going Expert, you're suddenly overwhelmed by loads of options you don't know and don't understand. People mostly prefer a gentler path, where you become familiar with one feature at a time when you need it particularly badly.

This, in theory, would suggest that the best approach is to morph the interface over time, making those advanced-but-useful features easier to access once discovered. But most people also hate interfaces that change, so in practice that approach doesn't work well. Maybe it will all be solved by a ML engine that looks at what you do every day and automatically serves you the features it thinks you'll want; but Microsoft kinda tried that in a bunch of places and I don't think it was particularly successful.

1) Just thinking out loud here, but some games have the most complex and information dense user interfaces you'll ever see. And sometimes they solve this problem by introducing new features in sort of a well-designed, first-class tutorial over the course of a few missions in a single-player campaign. Maybe Apps can try the same approach?

2) I can't help but think that many UI problems would be solved by Apps replacing meaningless icons with actual text labels. I can't remember what half the random symbols on software I use daily for hours means. If something is a sharing icon or a saving icon, I have no clue half the time. But simply having text labels on buttons and links everywhere would make all software a lot more explorable and understandable.

> some games have the most complex and information dense user interfaces

Completely different audiences and incentives. Gamers game because they want to; most people use apps because they have to, to get shit done and pay the rent. Gamers are motivated to inspect capabilities in order to get an advantage, to solve the gameplay puzzle, even just to kill time; people are motivated to get the hell out of apps as quickly as possible and go shopping.

I don't care about the capabilities of MS Word, I just want to type some stuff out. I don't care that Outlook can read RSS feeds, I just want to send an email. I skip every single onboarding wizard I can skip, because I honestly don't give a shit about 90% of "features" out there. If people cared about advanced features, we'd all be using Emacs.

> many UI problems would be solved by Apps replacing meaningless icons with actual text labels

I don't disagree in principle, but the reality is that text takes a lot of screen real estate, scales badly, and most people think text-heavy UIs just look ugly. We could definitely have better and more meaningful icons though; the "material" anti-skeuomorphing bullshit has inflicted a lot of damage on the credibility of UX practitioners, over the last decade. The 90s in comparison were a dream.

I don't think we really disagree on much, just having a conversation with some random points to feel out what I think about this.

1) I understand that the motivation for playing games is far different from the motivation for work. My main point is just to indicate that there's some games that basically simulate entire economies (on a planetary or even galaxy-wide scale) and a large amount of intricate detail. Using some approaches from games to display UI might help in the business world too. (and might have other benefits)

2) Text taking up more real estate than an icon can in a sense sometimes be considered a big feature rather than a bug. A big part of good UI design is picking and choosing what UI items belong on a particular screen. Icons IMO can lend themselves to bad overall practices because you can fit more junk into every single screen. If you need to fit every single possible command into one screen, the command line is the best method for that.

> The UX people were redesigning workflow to be “easier” and less information dense

I never really understood why they focus on these two things. They're good for rank beginners, I suppose, but once you've even approached competency, those "easier" workflows inevitably end up being a huge pain in the ass, and lower information density is actively a terrible thing.

> They're good for rank beginners, I suppose, but once you've even approached competency,

It's because you're aiming for a system where you don't need to reward the competency of long term employees and can instead just pluck random people off the street, pay them next to nothing and replace them when they quit.

This is a constant fight. The UI design people want a bunch of pretty white space, and the actual users want dense information. Despite people insisting they're "data driven", the design people rarely seem to appreciate the feedback.

This rings so true. As a designer it's invaluable to have teammates with domain expertise—they have a much better idea about customer pain points. Honestly, they can usually articulate the problems better than customers can in interviews.

Where I work it's not uncommon for people to come into engineering through support > support engineering > software engineering. At one point our top AE decided he didn't want the stress of selling and went from AE > PM > UI Engineer. These have always been some of my favorite engineers to work with.

> There's so many pain points in many customer service organizations that are easily solvable if a developer understood

AND if a developer actually has the opportunity to do something about it. Many companies overbook their developers time such that deadlines are constantly missed, where in that prioritization is their room for significant improvements to other services?

If the Engineering Manager is judged by their project throughput how does the EM feel about their reports working outside of that scope?

If there's value in Customer Service there should be a distinct team working on it and it shouldn't become a second job existing employees have to work.

100% agree, especially if it is industry specific specialty software. Seen so many applications that have processes that only make sense to the people that developed it and are at best tolerated by the users that have no other choice than to use it.

Don't worry, with no customer service the customers will also be placed into a void too.

Doordash devs went ballistic when they were asked to do a few PAID deliveries every month.

> Alas, Google has no customer service, so their developers shall be placed in the void until morale improves.

We had customer support for Google Fiber, and engineers could pair with a CSR to listen to calls whenever they wanted to. We were widely regarded as having excellent customer support, and of course, customers were calling us about our highest priority but most difficult to fix bugs.

If developers spent more time in sales or customer service...many of them would quit out of frustration, but some would refactor the world, also out of frustration.

The main reason you do this is to weed out executives who are mostly interested in the prestige. People like that are much more likely to be good at shifting the blame for problems than actually fixing or preventing problems.

as always, Silicon Valley covered/predicted this https://www.vulture.com/2017/04/silicon-valley-recap-season-...

> “You’re doing what Bob Iger does at Disney!” Jack tells Gavin. “He makes every manager wear the Goofy suit one day out of the year.”

That's what I asked my boss to do for me. Pair me with someone using our tool so they can ask me to do real world tasks and see how I can handle it. Should be later this month. And will try to do one session every month or so.

The issue in my opinion is their day or two on the job really doesn't give them a good picture of what's going on. Sure they might see a few things but they could just as easily be an anomaly as they could be systemic. I wish upper management that are brought in from the outside would be required to work a month or two in the field and live on those wages. For example at Starbucks in the 2 days he works he might see that the espresso machine is getting loaded wrong 40% of the time slowing up the line. Seeing this he might go back to the mothership and decide everyone using the espresso machine needs more training to reduce the failures. What he is missing is that there are supposed to be three people working not two and the person making espresso is working his fifth double shift this week because the wages are so low they can't pay their rent and is making errors because he's tired. He would have also missed that the manager had sent a worker home that day and the day before because it wasn't busy and the manager wanted to improve his margins. He also missed the next day when it was really busy that same manager was demanding that an employee on their day off come in and work because they were busy and if they didn't come in they would be fired (leaving them even more short of people and creating more delays). It's like a person who fasts for 24h saying they know what it's like to be starving. If you really want to see what's going on a day or two simply won't cut it you need some time for things to sink in and if you don't know what's really going on how can you run a business properly?

You’re making a lot of assumptions about how dumb he will be. Like you think he will just overfit on every detail instead of asking the store manager or employees about what he experienced? You think he will not work in more than one store, in more than one geography? Cmon man.

Honestly I think you're making as many assumptions as the parent commenter--I agree you're right that the portrayal of the exec is really biased towards assuming stupidity, but it really depends on the quality of the executive and the people that hired them. It's completely possible to get a total dumbass, and also possible to get a genius.

I know it’s an unpopular opinion to hold but I don’t think you make it to being CEO of Starbucks while being a dumbass

Eh, I think it depends on how canny the executive running the experiment is and how much experience they have in the particular part of the industry. I worked in restaurants when I was younger and now have done a lot of sales-side and logistics management, and it wouldn't take more than a day of working in a new restaurant for me to accurately understand some of the major issues going on. You just have to be open-minded, identify the best employees, and let them freely bitch at you for about two hours while trying to do the work with them. That'll give you a good sense of the big blockers at that particular restaurant. Same is true for any software org.

The difference will be if you think that you're going to come up with better prescriptions for success than they are (and this is where the level of executive cleverness comes into play). One day per month in a Starbucks shop and then giving technical directives wouldn't make any sense, but one day per month in a Starbucks shop and then redirecting budgeting at a corporate level might.

I would believe that's the case if Narasimhan were working a full shift, but he's only working half a shift once a month. At that point why bother? What are you going to learn in 4 hours a month where all the employees are on their best behavior and the store is made immaculate prior to your arrival?

What are you going to learn on a full shit that you won't learn at least half as well on half a shift?

I have a dumb question related to this.

The new Starbucks CEO is Laxman Narasimhan. Google says he's worth about $20m.

The previous Starbucks CEO was Howard Schultz. He's worth about $3.7b

Can somebody who is worth between $20m and $3.7b really just... hang out broad daylight behind a counter at a Starbucks from a security perspective?

Obviously I get the gap between $20m (he's just starting out, I'm sure his net worth will grow to at least $50m shortly if he does well at Starbucks) and $3.7b is huge. But at what point is going outside (without security? where people know you will be?) kind of a risk?

I think you're overestimating the danger of being outside.

What exactly do you imagine is going to happen? There are lots of very rich people walking around in public all day long with little ill effects? The most you can get by robbing him is the stuff he has in his wallet, which is pretty much going to be similar to someone with a much lower net worth. If you walk around in Palo Alto, you will likely bump into a billionaire or two on a typical day.

> What exactly do you imagine is going to happen?

If I was worth $3b (like the previous Starbucks CEO), I'd be worried about being held up at gunpoint/abducted/held hostage for ransom.

I am lead to believe Tim Cook doesn't just walk around like you and I?

There are very few people in the US that need security to walk outside just because of their net value.

CEOs of major corporations have private security details and they will undoubtedly be part of the planning and execution of this project.

I'm not a criminologist, but I would assume that personal safety has more to do with the environment a person occupies. Poor people are more likely to be victims of crimes than the rich. Being a recognizable celebrity or a target of organized criminals may be exceptions to the rule. How many people would recognize the Starbucks CEO on the street if they saw him?

If they were paid the minimum wage too it might drive home a greater understanding of their employees as well, though unfortunately the large existing bank accounts of the CEOs ensures that any lesson that might come with that small paycheque is not likely to sink in.

One of my recurring revenge-porn dreams is as follow.

I'm the owner (so not CEO) of a massive multinational. I'm mysterious and not really publicly known. The actual CEO is the public face.

Next, I apply for a role in one of the branches, say a local sysadmin, get the job and start working there. I do my job, intentionally fuck up a few times, and take note of any dysfunction in the organization. There's lots, management are bullies.

Fast forward a few months and at the weekly all hands meeting, it is me sitting at the head of the table. The local manager aggressively insists that I move, but I remain seated. He gets security involved but security does nothing. He tells me I'm fired but I don't blink.

As the dust settles, I open the meeting and immediately fire all of management, whom are physically thrown out. Next, I give all staff a raise and do something nice and personal for each of them.

Everybody claps. Then I wake up from the cat sitting on my face.

Isn't that the premise of the Undercover Boss show?

No, my story is much better.

Undercover Boss doesn't fire anybody as far as I know. The premise of Undercover Boss is a company that is starving their employees. To distract from this awkward reality, the Undercover Boss picks an employee that is double-starving, say a single mother.

And then radically improves her life. Everybody claps and is in tears not realizing that everybody else continues to be fucked.

Not my approach. I achieve total justice.

This is a great description of all feel good American media

I would complete the description by mentioning that the one employee that was helped probably had to return whatever help was given as it was just for TV.

They can keep their 20% discount though on the after-work course "5 ways to financial success" so that personal issues stop disrupting productivity.

Sometimes Undercover Boss does flip the script, the cantankerous employee is invited to meet the boss but instead of their hopes and dreams fulfilled, they get shown the door https://youtu.be/00cpVKavcOs

The only way things like this really work is by not giving any heads up to the store or the store management.

Otherwise store management spends a huge amount of time trying to tidy up before “corporate” comes by.

At least that was my experience when things like this happened at the fruit stand.

My experience at the lemonade stand have been similar.

Assuming he actually works the whole shift, he still can experience what works as a barista in his company is like (workload, how to deal with customers assuming they don't recognize him) somewhat truthfully.

I think it's worth something.

First line:

Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan told employees Thursday that he’ll work a half day every month at one of the coffee giant’s locations.

Something tells me it'll be something like 1-5pm; not the 7am rush.

>Something tells me it'll be something like 1-5pm; not the 7am rush.

11am-6pm seem to be peak hours for cafes near me - and google data confirms this. Why would 7am be peak time there?

I believe Google’s data would reflect number of people hanging out inside more than number of customers passing through, since a customer that stays 10x as long has 10x the impact on average number of people inside the building. 11-6 sounds right for times the seating area is most full, but I’d imagine the biggest rush of in-and-out customers is just before work hours. Fortunately, there’s a Starbucks near me that I happen to know has had its lobby closed for a year or two due to a high crime rate, and Google’s data for it does indeed show a strong peak from 7 to 10.

Friendly neighborhood barista here: actual sales numbers have always shown a peak somewhere between 7-10. If might appear busier later in the day, but that's more likely a function of having less staff for afternoons.

I've mixed feelings. Many probably wouldn't want the semi-dead weight of big executive screwing up the morning rush.

I haven't worked retail, I know its unpleasant but is there really that much skill to it?

Doing things, doing things correctly, and doing things correctly and quickly are VASTLY different things.

At rush time, you don't have time to think. You must have muscle memory to carry you.

I have never worked as a barista, but I have worked as a line cook. It's not hard to cook one thing. It takes some time and practice to cook many things at once at a speed that keeps up with a good lunch rush. You can also easily compound the situation by trying to go too fast anyway, resulting in orders being sent back.

Yeah it’s like juggling. A non juggling person can’t really just decide they’re going to juggle a few hours a month and expect some balls won’t be dropped.

This comment is such a perfect microcosm of HN

Yes, working as a barista means you're running multiple independent instruction loops in your head at all times, while also having to act like a pleasant sociable human.

Yes. About the least-skilled position in retail is working the POS. Even with a touch screen, it takes practice. It makes a big difference if the operator knows where all the buttons are as opposed to having to hunt and peck. Yes, the machine tells you how much change to make, but picking up the right number of coins by touch instead of by picking up a bunch of them and counting them out into the other hand, that makes a difference. Picking up single bills out of the cash tray without fumbling takes some touch. Knowing all the sizes (short, tall, grande, venti, trenta?) and all the drinks. If you are at a store where they don't print drink labels, you have to know the order in which to announce a drink (size, modifiers, drink-type, but make sure the modifiers are in the right order) and the shorthand for the sharpie markup of the cups.

There's skills you need. None of it is that hard. But it is not easy to do it at speed without practice.

Better not be during the rush. Someone who works half a day once a month is going to be worthless in a rush, and it isn't worth the trouble to train them because they aren't coming back soon enough to remember any skills.

During the less busy times, he might learn something, though. Especially if he talks with his partners. They still call the workers at Starbucks "partners," right?

Will he be remunerated the same as a barista for that time? I'd guess not. And that is an important part of the motivation/attitude.

It's really obvious when you put a c-suite 40-something or 50-something exec on a blue collar team: nobody's gonna be fooled for a minute. It's like that SNL skit of Kylo Ren from Star Wars going undercover in the employee cafeteria.

As long as you spring it on them they won't have a chance to tidy up first. They'll still be on their best behavior and follow every rule to a T once the exec shows up though.

to be fair half of what made that funny/awkward is Kylo fishing for compliments. If Narasimhan is chill, it might be less super-awkward. Plus, who knows Narasimhan. This is the first I've heard his name. I wouldn't be surprised if most starbucks counter employees don't know the name of the CEO, much less what he looks like.

It's not really name or face-recognition usually. Execs slumming it in the trenches just speak and listen differently. And they have very specific priorities there that day (it's not "I'm just covering my shift" like everybody else). They stand out, clear as day.

Plus someone involved in the running of the store has to know why there's a highly educated, highly curious 50 year old who doesn't know how to make a latte or work the till added to the crew today, and that person is going to want to make sure everyone is on their best behaviour.

I saw this happen too. Lots of people doing overtime to tidy up the store for when the regional manager came by.

I had my hand in a cast at the time in a work related incident, so I only did some menial tasks. The regional manager focused on me for a time, and was extremely frustrated with how slow I was. He proceeded to show me how much quicker he could do those menial tasks with just one hand. It was weird. I feel like the disconnect he had with the realities of the stores is on an entire other level than not being there to witness it.

Was his demonstration helpful? Or do you mean that he was only able to do the tasks faster because he was rushing them, or that fast completion of these tasks was not really meaningful to the overall performance of the store?

No there was no useful tips or anything new to his demonstration, only speed. If the completion of these tasks was meaningful to the performance of the store, it was only in his opinion. The store was already in the best shape it had ever been because of our hard work between the announcement and the day of his visit.

But he wants you to move fast all the time, so he can reduce hours somewhere as a result

Obviously he was only concerned about optimization.

Just want to make sure that it’s understood the point I’m making is that I had an obvious injury, still showed up for work, still did work, and was met with nothing but reprimand by this manager that I had just met. So in this particular case the benefit of a manager going down to the trenches seems only beneficial for one side.

It's funny because it reminds me of stories my grandparents told me about communism in Eastern Europe where the higher ups would come inspect their factories and the execs would know in advance and prep everything to look perfect.

If he and executive come in on a regular basis at the same stores, it won't be a such a big deal after a while. They'll get to know the staff at the store, they'll know the routine. Like if Tom Cruise was your neighbour, it'll just be "Hi Tom".

It's less about seeing how x store runs and more about seeing how the job for x employee is, no?

I dont think undercover bossing is helpful. But a CEO working a barista or manager shift at a store and dealing with customers and all the shit employees deal with it going to be insightful for the CEO. Hopefully that will help set policy and make work better for those workers.

Or, tell every store he's coming and everyone will tidy up! You don't even need to send the CEO to any store! /halfsarcasm

It's a nice gesture, but this sort of ear-to-the-ground work is something that everyone over a VP level should be doing in such a high-touch customer-facing business.

When it's just the CEO for one day a month...it's like when you see a frontpage news article declaring that your governor recently undertook a choreographed ride on the local subway to better understand their constituents' public transit concerns. Instead of making them seem relatable and trustworthy, it highlights how grossly out of touch they are.

One shift a month means that the CEO will have a much better feel for the customer environment and not be disconnected.

I hope he rotates through a few different stores, though. Otherwise, he may become myopic to the quirks of one particular location.

Once when I was working our incoming phone support a tech accidentally added our CEO's office number to the round robin system for incoming support calls.

CEO fielded 4 calls before he figured out what happened. No idea if he solved the problems or not.

I kinda dreamt since that day that any product managers would work some time taking support calls for their products and it'd be a better world because they'd realise all the issues we've been raising about their product are real.... But instead we were just lowly support folks who didn't know about product development and they continued to be "agile"

A little bit of knowledge can be less than useless. It gives the impression of understanding while passing over the harsher realities. The way that such a move is enacted matters. Is this shift scheduled on a random Saturday/Sunday with ~48 hours notice. Does the shift last 8 hours? Does his replacement randomly show up 30 minutes late and he needs to work an extra 30 minutes with zero notice? Does he need to open the shop bright and early after closing the night before? If the CEO is insulated from these rather common experiences then the exercise masks the problems with a veneer of understanding.

You make a good point. Probably better to just work a full two weeks at a location once a year than 1 day a month.

I’d like to see them work a month on worker pay, with no access to outside funds, house or car. Get some real empathy going.

This is pretty common industry wide. Executives who are actually serious about it will do it silently and without a PR campaign.

Oh, the cynicism.

I'm not exactly sure how this will go down for Starbucks per se, maybe it is PR-ish -- but to pull the camera back a bit, I think it would be tremendously helpful to normalize this idea everywhere, even if it may not always work out perfectly.

Yeah, I don't see the big deal. He's the new CEO and appears to be setting the tone, informing people of one of his first efforts. Stating it publicly seems uncontroversial for a business with publicly-traded stock.

I also don't see it as some veiled attempt to act like he's trying to empathize with every aspect of the workers' lives. Not that a lot of people are suggesting this, but some are, and it seems like an incorrect impulse to assume that. As the new CEO, he wants to see the operating conditions of their stores, where they make most of their money. Seems like a decent idea to me, and is presumably different from what the previous CEO was doing.

I used to work in hospitality.

One of the higher ups had worked his way up from the bottom of the totem pole. He would come and work the frontline and the employees were generally appreciative.

One of his subordinates followed his lead - except he had no idea what he was doing. He was slow, got in people’s way, and did things no frontline employee would ever be allowed to do - just give stuff away constantly.

At the end of the day, the CEO isn’t ever going to be under the same pressure or constraints as a normal employee. This is extremely likely to just end up being a vanity project.

>... I think it would be tremendously helpful to normalize this idea everywhere, even if it may not always work out perfectly.

It's all dependent upon the intent of the CEO or person coming in and doing the work. Just as an anecdote, I have seen too many times where a superior comes in with the intent of doing the work to prove it can be done better, rather than to understand the realities of what employees are dealing with, and the results are negative. I frequently had a COO who would come to my warehouse, get on the front line with processing equipment (just as an aside, this was an ITAD company processing end-of-life IT equipment for data sanitization and remarketing, so it's tech-related), and take a cavalier, "SEE! I could go through ALL of that in X amount of minutes! I don't understand why people can't move fast enough blah, blah, blah."

What he never realized is that he didn't do all the work. He'd capture only what he looked at in the system, never put anything away, and left a massive pile of work, and garbage, behind him that my team always had to clean up. He wouldn't take the time to do the rest of the work that the team has to do themselves day in and day out. He half-assed it and berated us at the end, and I could never get him to understand this. It's not that it "didn't always work out perfectly", it's that it made morale plummet every single time it happened.

So yeah, I share your sentiment, but to a point - it's reliant upon the person diving in to keep an open mind and actually give a shit about it instead of just using it as a, "Look at me, I'm a man of the people!" opportunity.

Given how unpleasant the relationship between the current CEO and their baristas have been [1], this can not start well, unless the new CEO takes some steps to make friends first.

1. under the current CEO Starbucks has racked up numerous labor violations for union busting

This is good. But it should be unannounced. He should just show up and work.

The marketing department will not allow that to happen.

This is good, right? Then a team of <trolls/activists> can all arrive at the same time and order a big pile of 'secret menu' 19-ingredient monstrosities from the CEO.

Social Media viral coefficient may have been higher with a quieter announcement and the CEO just showing up leverage social media managers.

Any CEO doing this for the right reasons - I.e., to help ensure the product is good - would whip the marketing department right into shape and tell them to keep a lid on it.

In this case, the marketing department was not involved, at least publicly. CNBC is reporting this from an internal email they got their hands on.

Part of the reason to do this is for employees to know that the CEO understands their job and their concerns. The vast majority of employees will not be working at a store the CEO visits, so it makes sense to announce it internally. It sounds like that's what they did, and CNBC got a hold of that email.

And it really should be a week or two. You can grind through hell on optimism for a day. Doing it day in and day out is the hard part and may highlight different negative aspects of the job compared to just showing up for 8 hours

I once took a cab in the middle of the night. The cabby was a elderly gentleman who did not seem to know his way around very well. It was a long ride so we got talking. Turned out he was the new boss of the company (a fairly big company, lots of cars) who wanted to get to know the circumstances under which his drivers worked. He had been working the night shift for a couple of weeks.

I hope you told him “nice chat, but under normal circumstances I’d be pretty upset that you took me on a joy ride costing me extra time and money.”

I'm not sure I see the point of this, unless it's just for PR.

Working a half day per month will tell you very little of importance in any workplace. And, if you're the CEO of the company and all of the other employees (and especially management) knows you're the CEO, working that half day will tell you exactly nothing.

As long as the customers don't know, I can imagine it might help.

Yeah, I guess I imagined he was looking for a whole-picture understanding, not just the customer interactions. But I suppose I was mistaken.

A customer is going to get banned from all starbucks on his very first shift for being rude.

I think you'd be surprised what even a little manufactured exposure can do. It doesn't need to be undercover. At almost every company I've worked at that asks for feedback I recommend some version of this. Some things I think you could learn in only a few hours at a Starbucks:

  * "Wow that machine is a pain in the ass to use"
  * "3 customers got angry at me because ____"
  * "Making ___ the way Jane showed me was much easier than the training"
  * "I hate it when customers pay using ____"

Sure, there are a few things. That's why I qualified my statement. But they're necessarily going to be minor things, not the larger persistent problems that only become clear once you've spent some real time working.

I find as a customer just sitting in a restaurant/Starbucks setting for an hour or so I can point out a handful of issues. And they’re typically not even “issues” to employees, because it’s what they’re used to. It’s just operational changes that could improve the situation for them or the customer. There might be a few things behind the counter I don’t notice as well but I think the reason I notice them is because I’m under the radar. If they knew I was an exec watching things I’d be seeing something differently (in many cases).

none of those things listed are minor things, those things are the entire job.

no, a CEO isn't going to know what a clopen is like, but if they're responsible for people who are designing a process / choosing a set of tools / setting expectations for employees, being willing to step into the workers' shoes is a worthwile move.

There was a Roger Moore show "TV NATION" where he challenged CEOs to do things with their products. "Format a Floppy" was one. The only one who took him up was the ford CEO who did an oil change.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_Nation

Michael Moore

Not sure how well this will work, other than as a PR stunt.

If he's serious about this, he should go in, in disguise, without anyone at the store knowing who he is (including top management).

This is only going to be remotely effective if the workers aren't aware he's CEO. Heck even the franchise-owner is going to have the store cleaned probably, ask his friends to come by and compliment the store.

They could do something like in Undercover Boss [1] so that employees (allegedly) don't know the person working there is the CEO.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undercover_Boss_(British_TV_se...

Starbucks doesn't franchise, at least in the US. Though you will find "licensed" stores in airports and such.

Ah yes, the CEO is slumming it. I would be more impressed if he accepted cafe pay for one month instead.

The CEO is probably independently wealthy, so shutting off his pay for one month does nothing. I think this is a great opportunity to get to know what it's like to work at this level, the type of people, etc. If this person has a heart, it should enable good changes in the company based on bottom-up feedback.

In the post Reagan era, a CEO with a heart is not going to be CEO for long.

My inner cynic screams that the cafes will temporarily become Potemkin villages, with fake customers, photo ops and everything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village

I used to work in tech for a large retail company and when you joined the company you had to work 3 days straight at one of the stores. Honestly it was brutal and they put me to work. It made me thankful to work at the corporate office if anything.

Try a couple of months at the wage they pay those poor bastards. That's the thing about "having to work the floor". If I'm the CEO, I'm making $10MM a year and frankly busting ass for 4 whole hours at $5000/h isn't a big deal. It's a completely different experience when you have to bust ass all week at $8/h

Any employees at those shifts are going to be terrified...

That would probably be the safest place to work, can't fire anyone with the risk of bad PR.

> That would probably be the safest place to work, can't fire anyone with the risk of bad PR.

Why? Just as long as they don't fire someone on the spot, live on social media, I'm sure their PR team can handle it. E.g. make a statement "Joe Schmoe had persistent performance issues and was fired a month after the CEO visit, there's no connection to the CEO."

Why even make any statement? That would seem more suspicious to me.

Depends on personality. Some will be excited to give him an earful about everything that makes their job difficult.

“And the handles on the carafes! You see this injection molding seam? You see where it is when I pick up the carafe for tbe 500th time today? You see these callouses? You’re not going to have callouses, you’re going to have blisters! Like everyone in the first week! And the packaging on these cups! You see this…”

I worked at the WalMart home office in Bentonville, Arkansas for about 13 years, the whole time in Information Systems, salaried.

For most of that time, there was something called 'store appreciation', around November, where everybody salaried had to travel to a WalMart store and work a full day there. And it had to be a Saturday, in addition to the normal Monday-Friday.

Most of my peers really complained about it, and it was kind of a pain in the ass, but it was usually illuminating and interesting. More than once, my experience there directly illuminated stuff I was working on or could work on back in tech land.

Inspired by that, I started to strongly encourage everyone on my team to spend a day in the NOC or Field Support (the two help desks we supported more than others) once a quarter or so. Again, a lot of complaining but most of the time we'd come back with some really useful insights.

EDIT: To be clear, 'everyone salaried' definitely included all of the executives, who would make a big deal out of it during big meetings, and often talk about their own personal findings.

It went back to a very "in the store, hands on" style from the founder, Sam Walton.

SpaceX (at least in my experience) requires design and manufacturing engineers to spend shifts on the production line to make sure there isn't low-hanging fruit in improving either the design or the manufacturing flow. If your manager hears complaints from the production team and you haven't spent some shifts on the floor getting to know the issue personally, you won't be long for the job.

It would be better to put the whole executive together into a location for two weeks.

yeah, one day is not going to cut it. Full immersion requires a lot more time. Also with a single day at once location, you risk being seen as "the special guest" and treated differently, while this kind of thing would smooth out over the course of several weeks.

That's way too much time. More than enough to allow some disgruntled workers to plan out and execute an assassination of the CEO.

You're not supposed to say that part out loud.

Getting to a working store will be hard if he's in Seattle, considering how many stores they've shut down in/near downtown Seattle in the past couple of years. Maybe he'll be flying to stores in the Caribbean region.

Article sez he 'plans to work a shift', then later sez 'he'll work a half day every month'. So I guess they mean a corporate shift?

Ask to be put on frontline email/phone customer support for your product a few times a year.

Hearing problems/complaints directly from the voice of the customer, then having to explain a sometimes cumbersome workaround to solve them, is invaluable. Plus you buy goodwill with your support team for walking a day in their shoes.

As it should be.

Nothing worse than a CEO who does not understand how their business works at the lowest level. Unless this somehow does not matter for business profitability or future (which there are examples of but much less than many people would think).

In my experience, upper management has this problem of getting accurate information. This happens for many reasons and is really, really, really hard to fix. It usually requires conscious, serious and sustained effort from the manager demonstrating his/her people that it is safe to bring information whether good or bad.

I bet the a shift once a month is good investment of time as long as he won't be placed in a bubble -- a model Starbucks location where everything works perfectly because the CEO works there once a month.

I really hope he picks a random Starbucks location across various cities.

I know people behave very differently when within hearing distance of a higher up. Now imagine you are the highest one... every person you meet, every day, is constantly thinking hard about filtering what they are telling you.

It does not matter if you pick random locations, people will still modify what they are saying when they see you.

But it helps a bit. There is higher chance you will finally meet some people who are not afraid to tell the truth. There is also chance you will start seeing some patterns. It is probable that managers will clean up a lot of stuff when they suddenly get to know about a visitation, but they won't clean up everything and you will get at least some glimpses. Visit enough restaurants enough times and glimpses may form an image of reality.

I think it would be better if he stuck to one. That way employees might over time become comfortable enough to voice their concerns to him. A one-time visit would feel more like an inspection than anything else and everyone would be on their best behavior.

I know there are companies that make everybody (PMs, engineers, whatever) take a turn doing customer support. This sounds a bit like that: make people who are normally at a distance from the actual customers and their needs get a face full of it.

I've spent a lot of time building software for people who aren't me, largely in domains where the users are experts in something I've never done. Even though I'm not a CEO, and this would be more of a lateral move on the org chart, I've always really wanted to actually spend a couple weeks just doing some version of their jobs instead of mine. I think it would be worth several years of just asking them questions about what they need.

Allegedly Costco has a policy of making their white collar folks work on the floor of their stores and rotate positions before getting to the office, same with McDonalds. I would love to hear from someone with first hand experience to confirm or correct my impression. I did confirm that Costco gives good benefits and decent pay for all their automotive section employees, and since then I only buy tires there (since 2000) for that very reason. Every time I visit I reconfirm that is the case. It is not much in the great scheme of things, but it is an honest effort to buy from good employers.

It's a noble idea, but it's not enough to give someone who's already wealthy beyond imagination a sense of the precarity of people who have to work to live. That's the real problem: people with all the power making decisions that impact people in circumstances they can't imagine even if they might have experienced something that vaguely resembles it 20 or 40 years before.

No matter what he does, he knows he gets go to home to a safe place with plenty to eat at the end of the day. You can't simulate the effect of the lack of that certainty on someone's work.

IIRC, Starbucks has a store at their HQ. Hopefully it's not that one.

Talking with the people on the ground is generally a great idea. I first heard of Hewlett-Packard doing this.

As can having execs be familiar with the boots on the ground business, so it's not just numbers abstractions.

Issuing a press release looks like a different or additional goal. Such as customer/investor PR for the company, internal messaging (reaching vast low-level employees via public news outlets), or personal brand.

They should pick a barista to be CEO for one day a month.

All of the execs should have to do this. Creating a vested interest in better working conditions and a better customer experience is good for everybody.

walking the Gemba

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemba

Can you imagine how annoying it would be to be one of the bariastas working when Schultz shows up and is just in your way for 4 hours?

Just FYI they got a new CEO

The reverse of this: in my early days in tech support for a major router manufacturer, we were told the CEO would occasionally call in posing as a customer, and agents had been fired for being rude or offering poor support. To this day I don't know if it was true or not, but it scared enough people to think Big Brother was always watching.

It's a good idea PR or not. Seeing employee stress is good since just because work is being done doesn't mean the employees are able to do it effortlessly. Stress on employees I think is overlooked as long as the work is done. Or rather the employee stress isn't noticed since it's not measured or even thought about.

Ah cool. One day a month where everyone has to be on their best behavior and everything has to work perfectly to impress the CEO who will, inevitably, not gain anything from the experience except the ability to pass judgement on employees that have to deal with the struggles of this job every day for like 1/100th of his pay.

This is laudable, and it will be good if it had a return on investment by identifying opportunities for improvement.

On a personal level, however, it would only work for me if Mr Narasimhan decided he didn't like the taste of the coffee and changed it; I haven't visited a Starbucks in decades because I find their brew quite unpleasant!

Ahhh “undercover boss” except not under cover.

But seriously, unless the whole shop is staffed by management, to get a taste of the job on some rotation, they will mostly just get in the way of front line people. In high school I hated, hated it when a boss would come in and do work. It just stunk the atmosphere.

Ideally, he gets reamed by some irate customers and gets to experience what the staff do on the daily.

> Starbucks CEO says he’ll work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month

> Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan told employees Thursday that he’ll work a half day every month at one of the coffee giant’s locations.

contradiction in the first sentence. doesnt leave this stunt in good light

What’s the contradiction?

I did a quick search and see a Starbucks shift consists of:

> Evening shifts are around 3pm - 7pm or 4pm - 8pm. Morning Shifts 4 a.m. - 1 p.m. Midday Shifts 8 a.m. - 4 p.m

Now where have I heard this before...

We few, we happy few, we band of baristas;

For any to-day that boils a brew with me

Shall be my bestie; be they ne'er so vile,

This day shall glow up their selfie post;

And customers in Bed-Stuy now a-bed

Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,

And hold their socials cheap whiles any speaks

That pulled with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

When I worked retail tech, I would find opportunities to go to the store to figure out what the pain points were for our hourly associates, and found time to work on getting those problems removed or reduced: happier workers equal more sales.

How about for a month per year? And they have to subsist solely on the wages earned from it.

Why would that be better? Wouldn't that leave him less time to do his actual work?

It would be better for the stated goal of understanding the culture & challenges of living as an actual barista at Starbucks, rather than just a publicity stunt.

Sure. But it'd also give them a level of empathy it seems many CEOs lack. I'd say that's worth 1/12 of their work and, if anything, might make them a more efficient and truly understanding leader the remaining 11/12 of the year.

And just skip any major business meetings in that month?

If you think he’s a bad CEO, you shouldn’t want him there at all. If you think he’s a good CEO you shouldn’t want him dropping his work for a month.

He's a CEO of a major company, man. They don't have actual work. This would be the most productive month of his life.

I was not expecting this Reddit level of comments on HN. Really hoping you are sarcastic.

Nope. The role of executives at large companies is to most effectively move resources away from labor and towards the owners of capital. They decide where to open the next branch to crush competitors who treat their workers and customers better; they negotiate deals with suppliers so those suppliers and their workers have fewer resources; they coordinate with other large competitors to hamper workers' attempts at improving labor conditions.

This, to me, doesn't qualify as work. Large company executives create no value. They only take and store value from those who actually perform real work.

This is HN, not /r/antiwork. Back to Reddit, you go, troll.

Acknowledging the relationship between capital and labor is not an antiwork sentiment.

That sounds like a lot of work to me. Whether it is good for society is an entirely separate question.

you're conflating work and, uh, "activity", so you're just talking past the OP instead of understanding them.

a common usage definition of work being used here is in terms of creating "use value". the ceo's activities do not. they do generate profit for ownership though. which is not the same thing as "use value" and serves a different purpose in society.

this is basic analysis, not a judgment.

Literally every time I've moved up the chain in my career I have done less work. I have seen the same in peers who have surpassed me. I have no reason to believe this changes by the time you reach CEO level.

The bit where they bring in a pro CEO in Silicon Valley who spends most of his time messing around with his horse-breeding hobby instead of running the business is basically just a documentary. Like most of the rest of the show.

This is how CEOs often manage to "do so much". All kinds of charity involvement, "advisor" work on other businesses, sit on boards, et c, then blog about how they still find time for their family and/or staying fit despite being so "busy". It's not because they're super-humans working 100 hours a week with perfect time-management discipline, but because a lot of them don't really do jack-shit for any of their "jobs".

Working a shift is great. While co-workers may act different, most customers won't.

Now... CEOs with "push-button menu option" based call centers under them should be mandated to call monthly and complete some task.

Chick-fil-A CEOs have been doing this (if not more frequent) since inception

I'm not familiar with the C-suite level, but I can confirm that my local CFA's operator is routinely working various positions at his store. When he isn't, he's sitting at a table working on paperwork.

I'm there a lot (some would say too much, but I wholeheartedly disagree!), and it's odd to pass through without seeing him. He works the register, he takes orders in the drive through, he directs traffic in the parking lot, he carries orders out-- everything. I'm certain that he's done shifts in the kitchen as well, just that I couldn't seem him to know.

Just today, I went into the restroom to wash my hands and he was cleaning the stall.

So basically an episode of the show Undercover Boss?

https://www.cbs.com/shows/undercover_boss/

This kind of stunt is right up there with "pizza parties" except unlike pizza parties, which only insult your workers, this will also completely stress them out for a day!

I worked for a large tier 1 automotive supplier where every new hire, whether you were an executive, salesperson, whatever, had to work the assembly line for their first two weeks.

Higher ups in Toyota used to have this. Where if you join Toyota even as GM/VP, you would assemble the cars for a week as part of your induction into culture.

Let me know when he loses access to his credit lines and general net worth during the period when he works, then get back to me.

All these folks are so out of touch with reality.

I am not sure if HN was always like this or something changed over time, but there is clearly no winning here/there's always a critic.

This is cool. IIRC Doordash has a similar policy for at least rank and file employees. I think it’s a great way to understand aspects of a business

It's a nice gimmick that gives some positive press coverage.

Only in a very dysfunctional company will this lead to any meaningfull improvement.

Hope they make him clean the toilets

I guess there is no PR wins in just listening to the floor-level employees, then?

Except he'll be paid 100 times more an hour to do so.

I know things are bad in the economy but dang..

I feel like there should be a word for this.

"UndercoverBoss"?

Does he have a degrees in gender studies?

Lemme know which store so I can avoid it.

Yeah, but don't just let him work in the Seattle suburbs, drop him in random Starbucks around America. Let him work a shift in St. Louis.

St Louis Starbucks are pretty nice, they aren’t putting stores in bad areas of the city.

If this was not a PR move, but a desire to get a sense for work conditions, real problems, etc, it would not be publicized.

Good luck keeping something like this secret. Also how else can you run a company if you don't understand what process can be improved and how?

> If this was not a PR move, but a desire to get a sense for work conditions, real problems, etc, it would not be publicized.

And it wouldn't work. I don't think a lot of people would be comfortable sharing real complaints with the CEO who parachuted in for a single shift. It will probably end up being a bit of a Potemkin village situation. The shift will probably be filled up with the highest-motivated, most ass-kissing employees, whose focus will be keeping the CEO comfortable.

Of course it is for PR, it would be really dumb to not publicize it.

It would absolutely work in a sense. Of course the CEO will not get a real experience and of course no one will bring any real grievances to him. But the CEO will still get some exposure to day to day. It is still somewhat better than not doing it at all. It’s a good precedent to set and one can only hope more CEOs would follow

you are underestimating the impact of programs like this.

The CEO will quickly spot broken processes and inefficiencies. Ass kissing can't make up for business problems. Beyond that, by working in a different store, gets a feel on how generic the approach can be, and where they need local optimizations.

The only think you are taking out of the consideration is toxic lower management and asshole colleagues, but that's not something I'd expect the CEO to fix directly himself. If anything he is just bored of the ass kissers and good news shows, and wants to regain a feel of reality

> The CEO will quickly spot broken processes and inefficiencies.

They will quickly spot what they perceive to be broken processes and inefficiencies, but they don't have real experience of the actual work at that level to be able to safely move Chesterton's fence.

How sure are you of that?

If you really meant that, you wouldn’t have posted it publicly.

I think that reasoning might have some flaws.

Could always be both

It would've been a better PR for them to have not publicized it. They really didn't need to, because people would find out anyway.

It can be both. If you have a better way to run your company, why not do it and also score a bonus PR win in the process?

If this is not solely a PR move I'd be genuinely worried about Starbucks leadership.

Time to go see an audiologists.

What an insult to the actual food service workers.

Complete waste of time that could be better spent improving their conditions.

highest paid barista ever

It should be a shift swap. He works as a barista for barista pay and the person he takes the shift from should be CEO for a day for CEO pay. Business Insider says[1] the new CEO's compensation is something like $28 million, so the barista should get around $115k for the day's work.

Maybe then both parties will come to realize whether or not the 3 orders of magnitude difference in pay is warranted.

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/starbucks-ceo-salary-laxman-...

I’m sure the regular employees will love enduring an entire day dedicated to the sociopath’s dog and pony show.

The CEO should just go work in a coffee field for a day. What an ass

Putin should fight one day in Bachmut and maybe some problems the world is facing right now wohld solve themselves :-)

Maybe he’s scared of AI and starting to train on skills that are harder to replace by computer, at least in the short term.

Fantastic. Now stop sourcing 1% of your coffee unethically (as per your statement that 99% of your coffee is ethically sourced)

I don’t know the details around this, but it seems like it would be near impossible to get 100% ethical sourcing, because no matter how good your process of vetting suppliers is, at Starbucks scale, you’re going to get fraud. A shady supplier just needs to bribe or blackmail one of your procurement staff to look the other way.

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