Criticism of Starbucks

[1][2] It is alleged that Starbucks was able to do this by charging high licensing fees to the UK branch of the business, allowing them to declare a £33 million loss in 2011.

[4] A YouGov survey suggested that Starbucks' brand image was substantially weakened by the controversy surrounding how much tax it pays in the UK several weeks after the allegations surfaced.

[5] Starbucks' chief financial officer (CFO) appeared before the Public Accounts Committee in November 2012 and admitted that the Dutch government granted a special tax rate to their European headquarters, which the UK business pays royalties to.

[7] The CFO denied that they chose the Netherlands as their European headquarters to avoid tax, explaining that the company's Dutch coffee roasting plant was the reason for the decision.

[7] The CFO told the committee this reflected costs such as designing new stores and products, but admitted that there was no detailed analysis by which the rate is decided.

The coffee they serve in the UK is purchased from the Swiss subsidiary, which charges a 20% markup on the wholesale price and pays 12% corporation tax on profits.

Reuters calculated that without paying interest on the loans and royalty fees, the French and German subsidiaries would have paid €3.4 million in tax.

[7] Protesters, who were unimpressed by the company's offer to pay £20 million in tax over the next two years, staged demonstrations in December 2012 in affiliation with UK Uncut.

[14] For example, Starbucks fueled its initial expansion into the UK market with a buyout of Seattle Coffee Company but then used its capital and influence to obtain prime locations, some of which operated at a financial loss.

Critics claimed this was an unfair attempt to drive out small, independent competitors, who could not afford to pay inflated prices for premium real estate.

[35][36] In April 2016, a class-action lawsuit was pressed against Starbucks after multiple reported incidents of the company purposely underfilling their latte beverages to reduce milk costs.

[39][40] In October 2006, the British NGO, Oxfam, accused Starbucks of financially wounding Ethiopian coffee farmers by violating Fairtrade agreements.

[42] These initiatives allow farmer cooperatives to earn more from its coffee brands, and enable poor growers to capture a greater share of the retail price.

[56] Some of the quotes have caused controversy, including one by writer Armistead Maupin about coming out and another by Jonathan Wells that linked 'Darwinism' to eugenics, abortion and racism.

[63] The hoax letter claiming that Schultz had donated money to the Israeli military was actually written by an Australian weblogger, Andrew Winkler, who has admitted fabricating the document.

[65][66] In 2009, demonstrators hung several banners on the shop's window and used white tape to paste a Star of David over the green-and-white Starbucks sign.

[67] They also distributed a letter saying, Schultz "...is one of the pillars of the American Jewish lobby and the owner of the Starbucks," which they said donates money to the Israeli military.

[68] In January 2009, anti-Israeli demonstrators broke windows of two Starbucks stores and reportedly ripped out fittings and equipment after clashes with riot police.

[76][77][78] A US Marines Sergeant emailed ten of his friends in August 2004 having wrongly been told that Starbucks had stopped supplying the military with coffee donations because the company did not support the Iraq War.

[91] When another shareholder (who had been quoted by NOM before) mentioned during a meeting that recent earnings had been "disappointing" since the boycott began, CEO Howard Schultz responded: "If you feel, respectfully, that you can get a higher return than the 38 percent you got last year, it's a free country.

Declining to comment, Starbucks instead referred to a statement by the National Coffee Association claiming that cancer warnings on products would be "misleading".

On ABC's Good Morning America, Johnson appeared for an interview and expressed his desire to meet with the men in person to apologize.

"[122] Starbucks was subsequently reported by Politico to have dropped the ADL from its anti-bias training, a decision that critics called "giving in to bigotry."

[127] In early 2019, Cher Scarlett, a former lead software engineer at the company who worked remotely out of St. Louis, Missouri, called out on Twitter that she had been subjected to a "long-standing" gender-based wage gap that she fought to have successfully addressed, and wrote a blog post about what she alleged to be a practice at the company of paying lower wages in areas that were predominantly black.

[144] In August 2021, 49 baristas in Buffalo, New York wrote a letter to Johnson indicating their intention to file the formation of three unions backed by Workers United with the NLRB.

[145][146] In November 2021, Starbucks began what some referred to as an "aggressive union-busting" campaign against the workers, including mandatory "listening" sessions at the three stores which had filed to vote for unionizing with the NLRB.

Additionally, workers said that they were contacted with negative talking points by methods previously reserved for emergencies, and were invasively surveilled and questioned about their personal lives.

Schultz claimed that while the company "isn't perfect", they are addressing worker issues to improve conditions, including pay raises.

Fleischer said when she reduced her hours to part-time availability after getting a second job from the lack of livable wages working full-time for Starbucks in a Facebook post that gained media attention.

[160] On March 15, 2022, the NLRB issued complaints against Starbucks based on two charges of unlawful discipline and termination of baristas Laila Dalton and Alyssa Sanchez.