Tonight was a slow night at the Starbucks where I work so I had time to lean against the counter and think. I recently finished reading Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber (which I highly recommend to anyone especially if they might be classified as a millennial or younger), and so I tried to follow the train of thought involved in the book to try and which parts of my work were useless to everyone involved.
I settled upon training modules, which no one truly pays full attention to and which are only tested by multiple choice tests which cannot possibly be failed. They waste the Baristas time, the manager’s time in scheduling for them, the district manager’s in making sure everyone has taken them, and all the way up to the people who wasted time making modules that no one will pay attention to as they look at them once and then never again. Even the manager responsible for telling these people to create the modules, in effect, has wasted time. This creates an overwhelming loss of time and creativity on a grand scale.
I decided to bounce this idea off of my equally bored coworkers to see what they thought about the matter. There was unanimous agreement that there was a tremendous waste of time occurring here, and that it affected every level, but there was one small disagreement that I had not anticipated. My shift leader told me. “It doesn’t waste Manager’s time. Manager doesn’t make the schedule. I do.”
This caught me off guard, so I questioned further. I had known that the schedule was created by a program which allocates total hours for a store and splits these hours accordingly based on the availability and desired weekly hours of all who work there. From there, minor swaps and changes can be made based on minute details, which is what I assumed my manager spent so much time doing. Why else would Manager nervously ask “is the schedule okay?” every time Manager noticed me looking it over? It turns out, they actually worry and obsesses over the schedule because the Manager is expected to have open availability, but my Manager has decided that they should never work Sundays or Wednesdays. In effect, my manager is, and had been, spending working hours to manually alter the schedule in ways which frequently caused scheduling issues and created inconsistency in hours.
This in itself is an issue, but it pointed to a more pressing issue which I had not considered. Sure, my manager is a joke. That much is common knowledge and a source of nearly all moaning and gossip among the store baristas and shift leaders alike, but now I was faced with the realization that my Manager’s shortcomings were beyond just incompetence.
I realized that I did not know what my manager actually does.
So, following this rabbit hole a little deeper, I decided to check out the official copy for the Starbucks Manager job description. The official copy is a little vague, presumably to allow regional and store-to-store variation, but it essentially boils down the position to that of leadership, money handling, communication, and accountability.
I asked my barista and shift-leader coworkers if they could tell me about what they knew of our managers task list and, more importantly, if they had noticed our manager actually doing these tasks. What I invariably found, and was shown time and time again, was that my manager’s work had been allocated to my shift leaders, and their work in turn allocated to the baristas.
Let us investigate this case study one part at a time.
Leadership
This can be argued to be the most nebulous of the responsibilities of a manager, but ultimately it can be divided into coordinating efforts and providing morale. It is very difficult for me to imagine that my manager does either of these things, as (1), her presence inspires dread in my coworkers as she is associated with being unable to correctly mark cups or stick to one position as denoted in the Starbucks Playbook and, (2), she spends the rest of her time in her office in the basement where she communicates not at all.
The fact that my manager is associated directly with disorganization and active sabotaging of coordination is something which bodes poorly for the argument that my manger is living up to the expectations of their job description. The part of coordinating shift leaders has been delegated to the shift leaders themselves, and in turn, the positioning of the baristas on the floor has been delegated to the baristas to discuss and decide for themselves.
Money Handling
Little can be said about money handling except for that this has never been entirely the manager’s jurisdiction. Money is collected by a contractor and the safe is counted by the store employees. While my manager has fulfilled such a role in the past, her role has never exceeded the same role when played by a shift manager.
Functionally, this part of the job description can and should be filed under the Lending a Hand section of the job description instead. It is a vestigial part of the role of a shift leader which is duplicated in the manager’s work for the sake of redundancy.
Communication
This, if any part, can be considered the actual job of the manager. This is frequently the only metric on which any manager is judged as it is the only part of their job where they are held accountable to a superior member of the Starbucks hierarchy. If corporate or the district manager does not receive a communication, then there can only be one person to blame.
In the case of my store’s manager, even this work has been partially outsourced to my shift leaders. One among them has been chronically overburdened with the overflow of work: expected to work through breaks, stay late off the clock, and complete a variety of tasks which are not her responsibility for fear of backlash from the manager. One of these tasks is drafting progress and performance reports to our district manager who is suspicious of our store manager. The shift leader takes some small pleasure in sending these emails to our store manager with our district manager CC’d in the recipients.
Accountability
And here is where the unofficial job truly takes place. Accountability, in this sense, is essentially a means of owning the success or failure of the shop. This entails taking responsibility for failure to communicate, properly handle money, or fail to manage/hire competent staff.
In a perfect system, this would make a good carrot and stick for the manager, but that is not the case. If anything, it is a pain for the district manager to try and find a new store manager on short notice while also expecting continued accountability from the lame duck store manager, so rather than bite that bullet, the district manager uses accountability as a whip. This is done through many feudal and often sadistic means, such as humiliation or embarrassment among other store managers.
Because the threat of failing is simultaneously high but non-fatal to a managerial career, our store manager delegates this to the shift leaders indirectly by threatening retribution in the form or writeups or reshuffling planned vacation time. In essence, the work which would regularly be held accountable to the store manager, is now pressed onto the shift leaders who will share in the trauma of the store manager should the tasks not be completed. These tasks will often include mailing or correcting mistakes in the shift leader’s time off work. The extended effect of this is that the baristas must work together to self organize while the shift leaders scramble to complete tasks.
So what does this tell us? What information can be extrapolated from such a tangled mess of transferred roles and accountability?
To be frank, I was not sure of this myself when I first wrote it all out initially. So far I had only learned things which I had privately already suspected, and as such my outlook had not changed much. I knew, and still know, that my manager is not going to be replaced so easily considering the sluggishness of corporate’s power and the burden of finding a replacement.
So I sat there and stewed, trying to figure out why this all bothered me, and then I remembered the systems suggested in Bullshit Jobs. That was when I had my second realization: This all bothered me because if the system only worked because of the levels of heirarchy, it should not work without the concerted effort of the store manager. Ostensibly my manager is being paid $60,000 a year to pretend to work and push back at those who try to do what she will not. Yet my store is still working and profiting consistently.
This suggests that is not just my store manager that is useless, but that the position of Store Manager is a useless and redundant job position because it can easily be achieved by the shift managers and baristas hired beneath them.
This opens up another topic entirely. How is it that managerial positions came to be paid so much higher than worker positions? I intend to explore this concept another time, as well as to explore how this position could be more formally shuffled into a better distributed store structure, but that will require more math and more time to research my store and its structure.
In the meantime, I encourage others to look at their stores and ask the following questions:
What does my manager actually do?
What is the economic value of my manager’s work?
Is leadership and accountability inherently worth more than other roles?
Do leadership and accountability require an imbalance of power and/or money?
I hope to hear from others who might have come to similar realizations and, of course, thank you for reading.
Someone sent this to me and I wanted to share it with you. It is from someone named Brant Hansen and was from his 2019 FaceBook page.
“Mangers are odd little things. They’re feeding troughs, of course. In ancient Israel, they were made of stone.
They’re not super-comfortable, but you know what? In a pinch, they can be kind of protective.
That’s why experts -priests who lived near Bethlehem, near…
