12 ms·

Starbucks to Revise Policies to End Irregular Schedules for Its 130,000 Baristas

108 points by blatherard 12y ago

nandreev 12y ago
Worth a re-read: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
sharkweek 12y ago
This article that sparked the response is phenomenal: "Working anything but 9-5" - http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/us/starbucks-workers-scheduling-hours.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/us/starbucks-w... A lot of the problems she is dealing with are things I have never experienced and likely never will. The things she is facing on a regular basis are personal nightmares of mine. Imagine if your life story started out "drug addicted mother and an absent father," what a disadvantage that is. Certainly worth a read.
- j_s 12y ago
  Discussed yesterday (managed to keep its custom title): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8177262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8177262
  - dang 12y ago
    Not a custom title, but the subtitle of the article.
- vacri 12y ago
  Maria Trisler is often dismissed early from her shifts at a McDonald’s in Peoria, Ill., when the computers say sales are slow. The same sometimes happens to Ms. Navarro at Starbucks. This is just a plain evil tactic, moving the cost of bad capacity planning from management, who made the decision, to the employee.
  - pc86 12y ago
    It's easy to blame it on bad capacity planning, but some times it really is just irregularly slow (or busy). When I waited tables it wasn't at all unheard of for the manager to ask if someone wanted to leave if it was abnormally slow. If there were no volunteers (or if everyone was indifferent) they almost always picked someone to go home. Same goes for it being extremely busy and calling someone who is off and asking if they wanted to come in to make some extra money.
    - nostromo 12y ago
      My significant other used to work as a Starbucks store manager in New York City. He would always comment that the weather played a huge role in how busy they were, particularly a sudden downpour. Planning around such ephemeral things is quite a challenge.
    - lthornberry 12y ago
      Even if it's not bad planning, the business is the more appropriate party to bear the risk of unexpected slow times than the employee. The employee has already reserved the time in her schedule because she's been told that she will be working then. Even if it turns out her works is not needed, she should be paid for those hours.
      - jaxn 12y ago
        Except that there are plenty of people who are willing to work for these terms. I own several retail stores. Labor is by far the largest manageable cost and whether or not we make any profit is often a direct result of managing our labor cost. Re: being the one who should bear the risk, I am also the one who bears the responsibility to make sure they have a job tomorrow. If we don't make money then there is no job. Of course, the alternative is that we could raise prices so that we don't have to be ruthlessly efficient. But then, the market doesn't tend to like that.
        ejstronge 12y ago
        I appreciate your position as a business owner but I take issue with your assertion that it's okay to dismiss workers because 'there are plenty of people who are willing to work for' those terms. There are also other practices that people might be allowed to perform but which are prohibited - consider, for example, young children working for businesses outside the home. I don't think the willingness of labor is a reasonable metric to gauge the fairness of a business practice. In general, I think it's the government's responsibility to make sure that pro-business positions (even understandable ones like what you're mentioning) don't unfairly hurt workers - to be fair, 'flexible' hours have been mentioned by the Obama administration multiple times this summer.
- scottfr 12y ago
  It really is a truly excellent piece of writing. There's not an ounce of apparent judgement or subjectivity in it. Rather the article is purely an enumeration of causes and effects that leads to a scathing critique of these scheduling practices and the effects they have on people's lives.
jt2190 12y ago
Part of the reason that companies enacted irregular schedules was to remove the ability of managers to schedule employees in a biased (or perceived as biased) manner. Some examples: * Employee A gets a more desirable shift than employee B. Employee A also gets along with the manager better that employee B. * Employee A gets a more desirable shift than employee B because employee A has worked for the company longer. Employee B is equally capable of doing the work. * Employee A gets a more desirable shift than employee B. Employee B feels that it's because of race/gender/sexual orientation. * Employee A covers the shift of employee B. Employee A now has enough hours to qualify as a "full-time" employee, causing an administrative headache. This is not to say that completely randomizing work schedules is the answer, just to point out that there's more reasoning for these systems than the article suggests. (edit: I worked for a major U.S. retailer when they were implementing such a system.)
- justin66 12y ago
  > Part of the reason that companies enacted irregular schedules was to remove the ability of managers to schedule employees in a biased (or perceived as biased) manner. Do you have any evidence to support this claim? (I hate to be that guy, but, wow...)
  - jt2190 12y ago
    I'm not sure what evidence you're asking for... That people sometimes feel discriminated against? (edit: The mere fact that Starbuck's has 130,000 barristas at any given point in time makes it quite likely that someday one of those barristas will sue them for discrimination because they couldn't get the shifts they wanted. If the company can prove that the shifts were assigned using an algorithm and not by a person, they have a good chance of winning their case.)
    - rando289 12y ago
      Evidence as in a source which is more authoritative than "random anonymous internet commenter" which says that companies use irregular scheduling to deter lawsuits & take power away from managers to discriminate.
pokstad 12y ago
I used to close and open the next day at Starbucks. Didn't mind though, since they worked within my college schedule and gave me hours that fit around my classes. Still, good to hear they are making advancements in how their employees are treated. First health care, then college, now better work/life balance. What's really great is how they accomplish this without being required to. Good job Starbucks.
mindcrime 12y ago
The most interesting bit of the article, to me, is this: “Encouraging managers not to rely entirely on the automated software is the best thing they can do. But I’m doubtful of how many managers will actually do it,” she said, because of the wide variation in how managers at different stores treat their employees. Why? Because it gets to the point that a company may, on the whole be trying to do the right thing, and may have progressive policies, etc., but - at the end of the day - it is individual middle managers who most directly impact the conditions that workers experience. I doubt this point will resonate with the left'ish wing folks who consider all business owners evil, blab about "capitalist oppressors" and want a wholesale adoption of socialist (or psuedo-socialist) policies, but this is the truth. Companies are not inherently evil, and companies can - and do - choose to try to do right by their employees... but enforcing consistent application of a policy related to working conditions is just as a difficult as enforcing consistent application of any policy in a large organization. The question then, to me, is whether or not Starbucks can find a way to ensure that this policy is actually adhered to. And at any rate, good on them for at least making the attempt.
- MeVfm 12y ago
  > Companies are not inherently evil You're right, companies are inherently amoral. If their pursuit of profit happens to be moral, all the better, but don't expect them to rescind immoral policies if it means it'll hurt profit and nobody with any power is around to put on pressure to make them stop. When they do awful things, those poor persecuted businessmen can always count on apologists like you to come to their defence though.
  - waps 12y ago
    Problem with that is that there is no "evil" there is only good and "amoral". I fully subscribe to one of the basic economic axioms. That people act out of self-interest (whether being a manager in a capitalist system or volunteering in a hospital in North Korea). This is a rule that's true "on average", not absolutely, but it is true in the overwhelming majority of cases you'll look at. That means "evil" barely ever happens. There are very, very few people who hurt others knowing they'll also hurt themselves in the process (there are, in theory they should be confined to insane asylums). This suggests it's at least a Nash balance. Almost all people who commit bad acts do so because they are expected a benefit in return. Murder, theft, rape, hell, even suicide bombing ... all come with a benefit to the perpetrator. This makes their actions fit your description of "amoral". The opposite of good is not your definition of evil. That's merely insanity. I'm not saying that never happens, but it very rarely do. The opposite of good is your definition of "amoral", and because of that it makes a lot of sense to call anything amoral evil. Having some machine learning experience I might also mention that I've noticed on easy communality in evil versus good. There is this concept of "time horizon" of decisions. Because predicting the world is a cpu and memory expensive process, when evaluating a decision people only simulate X time out. X is called the time horizon. If there is a decision that will have good effects for X-1, and cause a disaster at X, they will make that decision. What we call evil can, to some extent, be simplified as being a "decision with low time horizon" and good is the opposite. Hell, what most saints did can be summarized as making decisions where the time horizon is far longer than their lifespan, which doesn't make sense for most people. Alternatively one could say that you're trying to let companies get away from being called "evil" by taking a far extreme and then showing that they don't satisfy that standard. That you are presenting a "reductio ad absurdum" fallacy.
chrismealy 12y ago
A friend of mine had an internship helping folks appeal denied unemployment insurance claims. Almost every case come down to the employer playing schedule games and forcing the employee to quit.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
philip1209 12y ago
I'm working on scheduling problems at StaffJoy - shoot me an email (philip at staffjoy dot com) if you are interested in the field. We are revising classic OR scheduling methods to fit small workforces. With fewer workers comes fewer constraints and more canonical solutions, so just minimizing cost does not always create the best schedules - in fact, with little or no increase in net employee hours worked per week you can make cleaner schedules that prevent things like "clopens" and give employees consecutive days off every week. We are accomplishing better small-workforce schedules using a two-stage nonlinear model that first minimizes net employee hours (cost), then holds that minimized sum as a constraint (plus optional flexibility) to pick the canonical schedule that meets "nice to have" criteria, like letting employees pick preferred shifts ("I like to work mornings"). To learn more about the difficulties in scheduling, check out the "Nurse scheduling problem": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurse_scheduling_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurse_scheduling_problem
- thearn4 12y ago
  Yikes, sounds like a pretty tricky mixed integer programming problem. What are the usual go-to techniques for optimization? branch & bound?
  - philip1209 12y ago
    We're experimenting with different solving techniques. One of the difficult parts to fit into an algorithm cleanly is "pick how many shifts this employee should have" - e.g. should a part-time employee have two 8-hour + one 4-hour shifts, or one 8-hour + three 4-hour shifts. If you are trying to build that logic into the solver then branch and bound struggles but something like basin hopping seems to work better. However, with fewer employees you can just solve all possible weekly shifts per employee in parallel with a branch and bound. The most basic way to calculate the range is using the hours an employee works in a week and dividing it by both the minimum shift length ("not worth coming in for a shift of less than two hours") and max shift length ("don't have somebody work for more than 8 hours in a day"). Gets more complex when you move into problems like required number of days off per week.
dghughes 12y ago
Scheduling is so amazing when you are first exposed to it, I never used to work shift work until a few years ago but it was well-organized; minimum two weeks posting of your schedule, very few late/early shifts. Then as the years went on and new people took over it changed abruptly to pretty much daily. Lots of terrible shifts like 2pm to 10pm. One time my schedule changed five times in one hour. I've talked to staff who were on vacation and had their schedule changed to require them to work or change so much they return not having a clue what happened. Names of staff in an Excel spreadsheet seems to be the most common way for supervisors unfamiliar with anything other than typing words and numbers into a cell, and even then some can't even highlight or add colour. I can certainly see the value in a good schedule and a good application to create it but the complexity of it, business needs, lack of skill of management all seem to converge into one big clusterfuck.
recalibrator 12y ago
The last line of the article is heart-rending: “I want to surprise everyone,” she said, “because no one is expecting anything of me.” I have no doubt she will.

108 points by blatherard 12y ago

Worth a re-read: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

This article that sparked the response is phenomenal: "Working anything but 9-5" - http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/us/starbucks-workers-scheduling-hours.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/us/starbucks-w... A lot of the problems she is dealing with are things I have never experienced and likely never will. The things she is facing on a regular basis are personal nightmares of mine. Imagine if your life story started out "drug addicted mother and an absent father," what a disadvantage that is. Certainly worth a read.

j_s 12y ago
Discussed yesterday (managed to keep its custom title): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8177262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8177262
- dang 12y ago
  Not a custom title, but the subtitle of the article.
vacri 12y ago
Maria Trisler is often dismissed early from her shifts at a McDonald’s in Peoria, Ill., when the computers say sales are slow. The same sometimes happens to Ms. Navarro at Starbucks. This is just a plain evil tactic, moving the cost of bad capacity planning from management, who made the decision, to the employee.
- pc86 12y ago
  It's easy to blame it on bad capacity planning, but some times it really is just irregularly slow (or busy). When I waited tables it wasn't at all unheard of for the manager to ask if someone wanted to leave if it was abnormally slow. If there were no volunteers (or if everyone was indifferent) they almost always picked someone to go home. Same goes for it being extremely busy and calling someone who is off and asking if they wanted to come in to make some extra money.
  - nostromo 12y ago
    My significant other used to work as a Starbucks store manager in New York City. He would always comment that the weather played a huge role in how busy they were, particularly a sudden downpour. Planning around such ephemeral things is quite a challenge.
  - lthornberry 12y ago
    Even if it's not bad planning, the business is the more appropriate party to bear the risk of unexpected slow times than the employee. The employee has already reserved the time in her schedule because she's been told that she will be working then. Even if it turns out her works is not needed, she should be paid for those hours.
    - jaxn 12y ago
      Except that there are plenty of people who are willing to work for these terms. I own several retail stores. Labor is by far the largest manageable cost and whether or not we make any profit is often a direct result of managing our labor cost. Re: being the one who should bear the risk, I am also the one who bears the responsibility to make sure they have a job tomorrow. If we don't make money then there is no job. Of course, the alternative is that we could raise prices so that we don't have to be ruthlessly efficient. But then, the market doesn't tend to like that.
      - ejstronge 12y ago
        I appreciate your position as a business owner but I take issue with your assertion that it's okay to dismiss workers because 'there are plenty of people who are willing to work for' those terms. There are also other practices that people might be allowed to perform but which are prohibited - consider, for example, young children working for businesses outside the home. I don't think the willingness of labor is a reasonable metric to gauge the fairness of a business practice. In general, I think it's the government's responsibility to make sure that pro-business positions (even understandable ones like what you're mentioning) don't unfairly hurt workers - to be fair, 'flexible' hours have been mentioned by the Obama administration multiple times this summer.
scottfr 12y ago
It really is a truly excellent piece of writing. There's not an ounce of apparent judgement or subjectivity in it. Rather the article is purely an enumeration of causes and effects that leads to a scathing critique of these scheduling practices and the effects they have on people's lives.

jt2190 12y ago

Part of the reason that companies enacted irregular schedules was to remove the ability of managers to schedule employees in a biased (or perceived as biased) manner. Some examples: * Employee A gets a more desirable shift than employee B. Employee A also gets along with the manager better that employee B. * Employee A gets a more desirable shift than employee B because employee A has worked for the company longer. Employee B is equally capable of doing the work. * Employee A gets a more desirable shift than employee B. Employee B feels that it's because of race/gender/sexual orientation. * Employee A covers the shift of employee B. Employee A now has enough hours to qualify as a "full-time" employee, causing an administrative headache. This is not to say that completely randomizing work schedules is the answer, just to point out that there's more reasoning for these systems than the article suggests. (edit: I worked for a major U.S. retailer when they were implementing such a system.)

justin66 12y ago
> Part of the reason that companies enacted irregular schedules was to remove the ability of managers to schedule employees in a biased (or perceived as biased) manner. Do you have any evidence to support this claim? (I hate to be that guy, but, wow...)
- jt2190 12y ago
  I'm not sure what evidence you're asking for... That people sometimes feel discriminated against? (edit: The mere fact that Starbuck's has 130,000 barristas at any given point in time makes it quite likely that someday one of those barristas will sue them for discrimination because they couldn't get the shifts they wanted. If the company can prove that the shifts were assigned using an algorithm and not by a person, they have a good chance of winning their case.)
  - rando289 12y ago
    Evidence as in a source which is more authoritative than "random anonymous internet commenter" which says that companies use irregular scheduling to deter lawsuits & take power away from managers to discriminate.

pokstad 12y ago

I used to close and open the next day at Starbucks. Didn't mind though, since they worked within my college schedule and gave me hours that fit around my classes. Still, good to hear they are making advancements in how their employees are treated. First health care, then college, now better work/life balance. What's really great is how they accomplish this without being required to. Good job Starbucks.

mindcrime 12y ago

The most interesting bit of the article, to me, is this: “Encouraging managers not to rely entirely on the automated software is the best thing they can do. But I’m doubtful of how many managers will actually do it,” she said, because of the wide variation in how managers at different stores treat their employees. Why? Because it gets to the point that a company may, on the whole be trying to do the right thing, and may have progressive policies, etc., but - at the end of the day - it is individual middle managers who most directly impact the conditions that workers experience. I doubt this point will resonate with the left'ish wing folks who consider all business owners evil, blab about "capitalist oppressors" and want a wholesale adoption of socialist (or psuedo-socialist) policies, but this is the truth. Companies are not inherently evil, and companies can - and do - choose to try to do right by their employees... but enforcing consistent application of a policy related to working conditions is just as a difficult as enforcing consistent application of any policy in a large organization. The question then, to me, is whether or not Starbucks can find a way to ensure that this policy is actually adhered to. And at any rate, good on them for at least making the attempt.

MeVfm 12y ago
> Companies are not inherently evil You're right, companies are inherently amoral. If their pursuit of profit happens to be moral, all the better, but don't expect them to rescind immoral policies if it means it'll hurt profit and nobody with any power is around to put on pressure to make them stop. When they do awful things, those poor persecuted businessmen can always count on apologists like you to come to their defence though.
- waps 12y ago
  Problem with that is that there is no "evil" there is only good and "amoral". I fully subscribe to one of the basic economic axioms. That people act out of self-interest (whether being a manager in a capitalist system or volunteering in a hospital in North Korea). This is a rule that's true "on average", not absolutely, but it is true in the overwhelming majority of cases you'll look at. That means "evil" barely ever happens. There are very, very few people who hurt others knowing they'll also hurt themselves in the process (there are, in theory they should be confined to insane asylums). This suggests it's at least a Nash balance. Almost all people who commit bad acts do so because they are expected a benefit in return. Murder, theft, rape, hell, even suicide bombing ... all come with a benefit to the perpetrator. This makes their actions fit your description of "amoral". The opposite of good is not your definition of evil. That's merely insanity. I'm not saying that never happens, but it very rarely do. The opposite of good is your definition of "amoral", and because of that it makes a lot of sense to call anything amoral evil. Having some machine learning experience I might also mention that I've noticed on easy communality in evil versus good. There is this concept of "time horizon" of decisions. Because predicting the world is a cpu and memory expensive process, when evaluating a decision people only simulate X time out. X is called the time horizon. If there is a decision that will have good effects for X-1, and cause a disaster at X, they will make that decision. What we call evil can, to some extent, be simplified as being a "decision with low time horizon" and good is the opposite. Hell, what most saints did can be summarized as making decisions where the time horizon is far longer than their lifespan, which doesn't make sense for most people. Alternatively one could say that you're trying to let companies get away from being called "evil" by taking a far extreme and then showing that they don't satisfy that standard. That you are presenting a "reductio ad absurdum" fallacy.

chrismealy 12y ago

A friend of mine had an internship helping folks appeal denied unemployment insurance claims. Almost every case come down to the employer playing schedule games and forcing the employee to quit.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

philip1209 12y ago

I'm working on scheduling problems at StaffJoy - shoot me an email (philip at staffjoy dot com) if you are interested in the field. We are revising classic OR scheduling methods to fit small workforces. With fewer workers comes fewer constraints and more canonical solutions, so just minimizing cost does not always create the best schedules - in fact, with little or no increase in net employee hours worked per week you can make cleaner schedules that prevent things like "clopens" and give employees consecutive days off every week. We are accomplishing better small-workforce schedules using a two-stage nonlinear model that first minimizes net employee hours (cost), then holds that minimized sum as a constraint (plus optional flexibility) to pick the canonical schedule that meets "nice to have" criteria, like letting employees pick preferred shifts ("I like to work mornings"). To learn more about the difficulties in scheduling, check out the "Nurse scheduling problem": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurse_scheduling_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurse_scheduling_problem

thearn4 12y ago
Yikes, sounds like a pretty tricky mixed integer programming problem. What are the usual go-to techniques for optimization? branch & bound?
- philip1209 12y ago
  We're experimenting with different solving techniques. One of the difficult parts to fit into an algorithm cleanly is "pick how many shifts this employee should have" - e.g. should a part-time employee have two 8-hour + one 4-hour shifts, or one 8-hour + three 4-hour shifts. If you are trying to build that logic into the solver then branch and bound struggles but something like basin hopping seems to work better. However, with fewer employees you can just solve all possible weekly shifts per employee in parallel with a branch and bound. The most basic way to calculate the range is using the hours an employee works in a week and dividing it by both the minimum shift length ("not worth coming in for a shift of less than two hours") and max shift length ("don't have somebody work for more than 8 hours in a day"). Gets more complex when you move into problems like required number of days off per week.

dghughes 12y ago

Scheduling is so amazing when you are first exposed to it, I never used to work shift work until a few years ago but it was well-organized; minimum two weeks posting of your schedule, very few late/early shifts. Then as the years went on and new people took over it changed abruptly to pretty much daily. Lots of terrible shifts like 2pm to 10pm. One time my schedule changed five times in one hour. I've talked to staff who were on vacation and had their schedule changed to require them to work or change so much they return not having a clue what happened. Names of staff in an Excel spreadsheet seems to be the most common way for supervisors unfamiliar with anything other than typing words and numbers into a cell, and even then some can't even highlight or add colour. I can certainly see the value in a good schedule and a good application to create it but the complexity of it, business needs, lack of skill of management all seem to converge into one big clusterfuck.

recalibrator 12y ago

The last line of the article is heart-rending: “I want to surprise everyone,” she said, “because no one is expecting anything of me.” I have no doubt she will.