SBUX Starbucks Corporation

By Heather Haddon 

The 200,000 workers at Starbucks Corp.'s U.S. cafes are on the rapidly shifting front lines of the service industry's confrontation with the coronavirus pandemic.

Workers who pour coffee for millions of Americans each day risk exposure to the virus if infected customers visit their stores. They are also under pressure to keep cafes cleaner than ever to reassure customers as confirmed cases multiply across the country.

"We take cash from customers. They are sneezing and coughing and not covering their mouths," said Lacreshia Lewis, a 27-year-old Starbucks employee at Orlando International Airport, who is involved in a union-backed campaign for more benefits.

Ms. Lewis, who is pregnant, wants the franchisee of that Starbucks store, HMSHost, to provide her paid sick time and face masks. HMSHost said its workers at more than 1,700 North American airport and other travel restaurants get paid flexible time, and that it is following federal guidelines that don't recommend service workers wear masks.

Starbucks said Wednesday that it would pay any U.S. workers exposed to coronavirus during a 14-day quarantine period. Starbucks also extended the benefit to all employees who are above the age of 60, pregnant or have underlying health conditions.

"Our commitment is to always do what's best for you, our customers and our communities," Rossann Williams, executive vice president for Starbucks stores in the U.S. and Canada, said in a letter to employees on Wednesday.

Starbucks already granted paid sick leave and insurance to employees who work at least 20 hours a week. But not all franchisees extend all the same benefits as company-owned stores. Starbucks owns 8,867 cafes in the U.S., and licenses an additional 6,321 to franchisees.

Other U.S. chains are also working to protect workers and assure customers their restaurants are safe. McDonald's Corp. said it would pay employees at its company-owned U.S. stores if they need to be quarantined. Darden Restaurants Inc., owner of Olive Garden and other chains, said it would speed up plans to grant paid sick leave to its more than 180,000 hourly workers at 1,800 locations.

The world's largest coffee chain has sent U.S. employees at least five memos in the past two weeks explaining added benefits and new steps to keep cafes clean. One stretched over four pages, according to a copy reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. It set guidelines for everything from when to wear plastic gloves to how to properly mount hand sanitizer on walls.

The pandemic is already weighing on Starbucks's bottom line. The company last week cut its sales forecast for China, its second-biggest market, after the outbreak there forced it to temporarily shut more than half of its 4,300 stores and suspend work to open new locations.

Most of those stores have reopened, but Starbucks also has temporarily closed or limited hours at stores in countries including Italy, Japan and South Korea with intense local outbreaks of the virus. Estimated losses have reached into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Starbucks temporarily closed a cafe in downtown Seattle last week after a worker there was infected with coronavirus and quarantined. Starbucks, which is based in Seattle, said it sent home employees who had direct contact with the worker and did a deep clean of the store.

The more stringent cleaning regimen is exacerbating frustrations among some workers who said other recent changes have left them overworked. Starbucks has shifted a higher portion of its orders to mobile platforms than most other chains, adding complexity for workers filling orders placed online as well as at counters and drive-throughs.

"The store gets more and more dirty as we don't have the time to properly clean," one store worker said on an internal message board reviewed by the Journal. Denise Nelsen, a Starbucks U.S. operations chief, responded that the company was working to give managers the labor and resources they needed.

Starbucks said the more intensive cleaning should take about 30 minutes a day on average, and gave managers that time in budgeted labor hours to accommodate the work.

Supervisors at one New York store convened last month to figure out how to implement the new cleaning guidelines, a participant in that discussion said. "We didn't even have a spare bucket to do this, let alone a store-wide meeting to ensure all the baristas were on the same page," the person said.

A Starbucks spokeswoman said employees are being instructed to deprioritize nonessential tasks such as organizing stock to make time for the extra cleaning.

Several Starbucks workers said their hands were getting dry and raw from all the extra washing. One shift leader at a cafe in San Bernardino, Calif., said the company was playing an audio message every half-hour over the headsets that some employees there wear, reminding them to wash their hands that often.

The person planned to bring a tub of balm for co-workers' hands. "Your skin will crack and bleed," the shift leader said.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 12, 2020 12:12 ET (16:12 GMT)

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