Starbucks says human connection is driving a comeback. Baristas say it’s breaking them

“You don't go out on strike for a job that you don't care about,” said Silvia Baldwin, a 29-year-old barista who works shifts at a Starbucks $SBUX in West Philadelphia — or at least did until Starbucks Workers United went on strike last November. “We love our jobs. We love being in our communities and connecting with customers and being part of their daily routine.”

“I'm an opener,” she told Quartz in an interview this week. “So I get up bright and early to see all the people coming to the area for work, all the familiar faces.” Over time, the daily encounters have turned into years-long friendships, she said.

That sense of connection is precisely what Starbucks executives are now crediting with a return to growth after eight quarters of stagnation. On Wednesday, Starbucks reported that comparable store sales rose 4% in the U.S. in its fiscal first quarter, driven by modest ticket growth and, more to the point, increased visits and transactions. Consolidated revenue climbed 6% to just under $10 billion.

“Our Q1 results demonstrate our ‘Back to Starbucks’ strategy is working and we believe we’re ahead of schedule,” CEO Brian Niccol said in a statement, pointing to more customers choosing Starbucks more often. The strategy includes renewed emphasis on the customer experience — especially deliberate, personal interactions between baristas and customers — or what the company calls its “Green Apron Service” model.

In a July announcement, management said the model was designed to bring “more warmth, connection, and care to every cup,” encouraging baristas to remember customers’ names, offer personalized remarks — to, essentially, make store visits more emotionally satisfying. If you’ve been in Starbucks lately, and the barista has said “I like your hair” or looked you in the eye while asking how your Tuesday’s going, then you’ve experienced it.

In pilot stores, the company said, Green Apron Service led to faster service and greater customer engagement. So in August, it was rolled out nationwide.

For workers like Baldwin, that connection was always part of the job — something she genuinely loved about it. But she and other unionized baristas say the formalization of emotional labor, layered on top of already understaffed shifts and a deluge of DoorDash and Uber $UBER Eats orders, has intensified pressure on the shop floor, helping set the stage for the strike that followed months later.

Executives are “trying to force customer connection by mandating that workers write messages on cups instead of just doing that willingly,” Baldwin said. “It totally slows down production. And it's really difficult and frustrating to have to stop short with every single drink you're making to write a message.” But baristas face discipline if they don’t write the messages, she said, including criticism for not being “authentic enough.”

To require baristas to connect with customers emotionally is one thing. To require them to mean it is another, recalling workplace satires like Office Space in which service workers are chastised for meeting minimum “flare” requirements, mandating not just that they “express themselves,” but that they make that expression appear spontaneous and voluntary.

“What would actually make it easier to connect with customers is having more workers on the floor,” Baldwin said. “If we had more time, more staffing, more dignity, the connection would happen naturally.”

Understaffing, she said, means workers are often juggling in-store orders alongside mobile orders and struggling to do simple things like take the trash out with just two people on the floor. The company’s baseline hourly wage is closer to $15 nationally, Baldwin said— f ar below the roughly $30-per-hour figure Starbucks has cited by bundling wages and benefits across roles. Starbucks Workers United says many baristas struggle to pay their bills while working schedules that fall just short of eligibility thresholds for benefits, such as the company’s famed health insurance, which is a rare offering in service work.

In an email interview with Quartz, David Jacobs, an adjunct professor of management at American University’s Kogod School of Business and an expert in industrial and labor relations, said the Starbucks strike reflects both renewed energy and deep structural constraints in U.S. service-sector organizing.

In the 1960s, Jacobs said, about 40% of U.S. food store workers were unionized, along with roughly 12% of retail workers overall. Those figures have fallen dramatically in more recent decades, however, as the industry has undergone restructuring and what he described as “union busting/avoidance.”

“Union density is now only 1.2% in the food service industry, which is a virulently anti-union subset of the service sector. The overall U.S. population supports unionism by a substantial majority — 70% in a recent Gallup Poll,” he said, referring to a 2022 survey. “But employers have considerable power to intimidate workers.”

Still, Jacobs said that the 2020s have “brought renewed union organizing in specific industries powered by young workers who have faced economic crisis and a pandemic. They have learned a kind of defiance.”

This shift has helped Starbucks Workers United organize hundreds of stores nationwide — almost 600 by the union’s count, or about 6% of all U.S. stores — even as the company has resisted bargaining on a national scale. Jacobs described Starbucks’ corporate response as tilting between engagement and retrenchment. After initially stonewalling union efforts, the company entered negotiations and reached a framework agreement with the union in early 2024 — only to pull back again under new leadership.

“The new CEO has reverted to a union-hostile stance, limiting economic concessions,” Jacobs said. He added that Starbucks has pursued an aggressive legal strategy, contesting store-by-store elections and, alongside companies including SpaceX and Trader Joe’s, seeking to weaken the foundations of U.S. labor law including the Wagner Act. Meanwhile, for workers, he said, “it’s difficult to wage a national struggle across a huge number of individual stores, especially given Starbucks’ mostly hostile reaction.”

Asked what the public misunderstands about the contemporary labor movement, Jacobs pointed instead to management. “The lack of understanding applies primarily to employers who regard union organizing as evidence of failures that they seem not to recognize,” he said.

That’s of a piece with Baldwin’s account. “Niccol doesn't know how to do our jobs — couldn't do our jobs even if he tried,” she said, then pointed to the CEO's compensation, which clocked in at $96 million for just a few months’ work in 2024, while falling to $31 million for 2025. Niccol, 51, was previously CEO of Chipotle $CMG and Taco Bell. A Philadelphia native, he grew up not far from Baldwin's store. “Meanwhile, workers are struggling to pay their bills,” she said. “It’s like Niccol and the other executives are looking everywhere else and trying everything else except for listening to their workers about how to turn things around.”

If anything, however, Starbucks appears to be taking steps to minimize management’s contact not just with workers but the public. Late Monday, a 14A filing from the company revealed that Niccol is now required to use Starbucks’ private jet for all travel, including personal trips, following a security review that cited “enhanced media attention” and “the current threat landscape.”

Under the revised arrangement, Niccol no longer has to reimburse the company for personal use of the aircraft, a change from a prior policy that capped such expenses. Starbucks also disclosed spending more than $1 million on executive security for Niccol in fiscal 2025, including personal-driver services and temporary housing.

Starbucks did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

It’s a stark contrast, to say the least. As Starbucks leans on store-level employees to make human connections and to help the company return to a streak of steadily increasing profits — while also fighting to keep those workers from organizing — its leadership is becoming more buffered from the world it's helped helped create.