Disclaimer: This blog reflects solely the author’s personal experiences and perspectives. It’s not intended to criticize Starbucks or anyone associated with the company.
It’s been around 7 months already that I’ve been working at Starbucks as a barista and sadly, for some reason, I’ll be leaving soon to start a new chapter. Before I go, I’d like to review my routine work and also share my thoughts. For people who randomly pick up this blog, you can also check out how I got a part-time job in Vancouver, Canada, in my previous blog post
How I got part-time job offers in Canada
Before I landed the job, I spent hours watching so many videos published on YouTube & TikTok about working at Starbucks to see what a day in the life of a Starbucks barista was like. I was so excited because, if I were to work part-time, Starbucks would be my top choice. Most of the videos I watched focused on a day in the life of a Starbucks barista, opening shift responsibilities, and coffee-making techniques. Honestly, I wasn’t aware that Starbucks has two types of stores: company-operated and licensed stores. The distinction between both of them is simple. A company-operated store is owned by the company itself, while a licensed store is basically franchised. The benefits between both stores are quite slightly different and to be honest, until now, I’m still not too sure about this information. So can you guess which kind of store I’m working at? That’s right, a licensed store…
Day One
I do remember my first day as if it happened yesterday. Arriving at the store in the morning with lingering fatigue from a recent fever, I found my ex-manager and another colleague were working there and dealing with a long line of customers. After greetings to both of them, my ex-manager asked me, “Can you work on the POS system? You know how to work with it, right?” It kind of blew me away, LOL. I didn’t expect that on my first day as a fresh-faced rookie, I would be the one who had to receive orders from those customers during rush hour. I looked at those customers in the queue. I sensed the mix of confusion and impatience as if they were sending me negative energy, and I could feel their eyes screaming, Give me my f*cking coffee, newbie!
I stood there in stunned silence for 3 to 5 seconds and thankfully, my coworker, Lotti, a German girl, replied to my ex-manager instead of me, “Okay, I can train him how to do it.” At that moment, I felt so secure. (Lotti, if you happen to come across this, a heartfelt thank you once again.) My first shift was just a short 4-hour shift but I felt it was so long. I remember I messed up lots of drinks I took from customers. Because I had never worked in a cafe store before, that was my first time. On some orders, I had no idea what the drink was and you know what? Starbucks has lots of drinks that we have to memorize and every drink is open to customization. Also, I feel like the Starbucks POS system is not exactly user-friendly. For newcomers like myself, locating and inputting the right drink, especially with customization, often feels like navigating a maze. Up until now, I still find myself wasting my time looking for where that drink is.
“Ice triple espresso, almond milk, 2 pumps of vanilla syrup, 2 pumps of white mocha sauce, in the Venti cup, sweet cream cold foam, extra caramel drizzle on top."
It sounds like a short story, right? But nah, that’s an order. Can you imagine what my face looked like? All I have to do is say, “Sorry, come again, please.” During that time, I have to glance my eyes through all of the buttons on the screen as fast as I could to key the drink properly. After finishing my first day, I got a free small cup of Americano and headed straight right back to bed and had a day’s sleep.
After that day, I felt like I didn’t want to go to work. There is something wrong here. I kept asking myself, Why wasn't I given proper training before diving into a real job? If I remember correctly, it took me a couple of months to get hands-on and move from the POS system to work on a bar. Everything went the same as far as I was concerned. I had no idea how to make drinks either, LOL. But thanks to my lovely coworker, I learned how to make drinks from my friends there and also learned it through TikTok videos. I just found out later on that there is a recipe book showing how to make almost every drink, which makes me curious why my manager didn’t inform the staff in the group at the very beginning. I’m probably the only one who didn’t get on board, I guess. But I still managed to roughly get through it. It also took me a couple of months to gradually gain confidence and get hands-on with the hot/cold bar. The thing I appreciate here is that if I make a mistake, like messing up a drink for customers, I don’t have to cover the cost of that drink. Starbucks provides us with a sort of sandbox environment. I could say that if I had to pay for my mistakes, I’d have lost over $200 by now.
At my store, I’ve noticed there are four main types of shifts: opening, mid-shift, pre-closing, and closing. Each comes with its own set of advantages and drawbacks. The opening shifts involve tasks like setting up a store, making iced coffee/tea, preparing sandwiches & pastries, logging into the POS system, and preparing bills & coins. I genuinely don’t want to be put on the opening shift because I’m not a morning person. I have to wake up super early, and here in Vancouver, it’s still dark outside. The sun usually rises after 7:30 a.m. However, opening shifts do come with dealing with rush hours but most of the time, most of the orders are hot drinks (which are easy to make) and there are a lot of regular customers. Mid-shifts—I'd say this is a dream shift. Workers mainly focus on routine tasks such as making drinks, warming up sandwiches or pastries, or doing the POS system without any special duties. Pre-closing shifts, I’ve found myself most often on. After 1:00 PM, workers mostly have to deal with more cold drinks, such as Frappuccinos (which are slightly more complicated than hot drinks). Workers primarily focus on the pre-closing tasks, which basically wash dishes accumulated throughout the day. I personally think it’s a bit unfair at times, especially if you end up spending more time washing dishes than working at the bar. It sounds like a dishwasher position to me, though. Closing shifts—this is the worst for me. If pre-closing shifts aren’t able to complete the dishwashing, it fails on closing shifts to finish the task. Workers primarily have to deal with washing all of the dishes, cleaning duties, restocking all the cups and milk, preparing sandwiches & pastries for the next day, and generating sales reports. I could say the pace of the closing shift largely depends on how well pre-closing tasks were handled earlier in the day. But the good thing is, that closing shifts have the chance to take home any food items those are about to expire at the end of their shift.
Things I like and Don’t like
Let’s start with the things I like while working at Starbucks. At my store, employees could enjoy up to three free drinks per shift. Otherwise, employees would get just a 30% discount. For all sandwiches, pastries, and merchandise, employees would also get a 30% discount. As I mentioned earlier, with this discount, employees would get it only from the same franchise company, which basically means I couldn’t walk into any Starbucks stores and ask for a discount. For me, I think it’s not that bad. Imagine that if you take three Venti-sized drinks daily (actually, you can go for Trenta-sized), you would probably gain lots of weight because of the sugar content inside. I could probably also take home a bag of coffee beans once a week.
Now, let’s talk about things I wouldn’t say I liked while working here. Firstly, as I mentioned earlier, I have to memorize lots of drinks and how to make them. Starbucks usually rolls out new seasonal drinks every 3 to 4 months. It can be a bit overwhelming. But the good thing is that most new drinks usually follow a similar recipe pattern. For example, a Grande-sized typically comes with 4 pumps of syrup or an Oat Latte typically comes with a blonde shot of espresso. Secondly, I have to deal with lots of customers. Some of them are good, and some of them are sh*t. As far as I can tell, working during rush hour is better than dealing with problematic customers. What pisses me off sometimes is when they want to scan to earn a reward, and then the scanner kind of doesn’t want to do the job and the customer just looks at the scanner with confusion and does nothing. I felt like, Come on, man, this is just a scanner. This world has been using this technology for over 10 years, just give your phone a little wiggle, and it should work fine. Sometimes the homeless come to ask for free drinks or just come in and go straight right to the private washroom in the back office and do illicit activity. Sometimes someone grabs the tumbler or juice bottle and runs away, and all I can do is just call out, “Hey sir!”. That’s about as far as I’ll go. I’m definitely not about to risk my life chasing them or confronting them, though. Sometimes some customers come and order brewed coffee with extra cream or milk. After serving them, they sipped it, and then they started complaining, Why is my coffee cold? I felt like, Come on, you just ordered extra cream man. (The brewed coffee barista won’t steam the cream/milk for customers because Starbucks doesn’t charge for it.) When I see customers like this, it kind of makes me feel like, WTF, Are you dumb or something? But of course, all I could do was apologize and offer to remake the drink (which is pretty much all the same, just slightly less cream or milk). Lastly, in franchise stores, I feel like the job is good or bad; it depends on the manager directly. Because they have authority over various aspects of the store, including scheduling fairness, drink quality, team productivity, or overall organization, it all depends on the manager. The manager has the discretion to appoint supervisors. Based on my experience, when decisions rely on human judgment rather than a robust system or framework, biases often come into play, creating challenges for the team to navigate
What I learned from this position
Working at Starbucks has been a mixed experience for me. I’ve had plenty of enjoyable moments while working here, whether it’s interacting with customers or coworkers. The job has taught me valuable skills like coffee-making, running a small shop, handling customer interactions, and dealing with people. My background is quite different. I’m the kind of person who always sits in front of a computer and talks with the computer. I’ve never had to deal with lots of people. Surprisingly, it’s even nudged me towards being more extroverted, I guess. I also found some friends, and I feel happy to get to know them and work with them. The only thing that makes me so sad to quit this job is because of my friends there, even though sometimes they make me feel frustrated. LOL. I still wish I could see them again.
Alright, Thank you for reading to the end. I wish you guys a nice day.
