TROUBLE BREWING College Ave Starbucks closure comes after months of management turnover and frustration among employees.
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By Ta n n e r H a r di ng
broken grease trap. A missing ice bucket. Space, attendance and staffing issues. These are the official reasons Starbucks is giving for the closure of its College Avenue store on June 10. Employees, however, say those are just excuses. The Starbucks location in Collegetown, along with the two other locations in Ithaca, voted to unionize back in April. Shortly after, the now much talked about grease trap broke, causing workers to strike, citing unsafe working conditions. On June 3, the employees were told the store would be permanently closing in one week. “I have no idea what the grease trap even is, I don’t know where the grease comes from,” shift supervisor Bek MacLean said. “Apparently at other Starbucks it’s underground. All I know is it’s really stinky. We operate around it. We’ve been dealing with the stinkiness and nastiness of this grease trap since I got hired there in 2017.” According to some Starbucks baristas in online forums, the grease trap collects grease from milk fat, among other runoff from the hundreds of drinks made daily. On April 16, a failure of that trap led to its contents spilling across the floor. Despite customer complaints about the smell and employee concerns about safety, the store’s manager would not close the café. Shortly after, employees decided to walk out. Though the unionization efforts that began at the start of this year and the grease trap-fueled strike in April were certainly more public efforts for better working conditions, MacLean said there had been issues behind the scene for much longer. Since Oct. 2021, MacLean said the College Ave store has had at least four different district managers and four different store managers, to varying degrees of success. She said there was originally a manager at the store named Tracy, who she described as awesome. “She cared about the [employees], she wanted our store to be unique and involved 8 T
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P i c k e t e r s p r o t e s t i n f r o n t o f t h e C o m m o n s l o c at i o n o n J u n e 1 1 . ( P h o t o : A s h B a i l o t) with the community,” MacLean said. “And then around Christmastime, she abruptly walked out.” MacLean said a “support manager” from Seattle came in and had a meeting with the manager, who left shortly after. The following week there was a storewide meeting led by the support manager, and when she asked the group had any questions, MacLean asked why Tracy had left. 15–21,
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“She said [Tracy] was getting overwhelmed with the holiday season,” MacLean said. “That doesn’t make any sense for our store. That’s the slowest time of the year for our store because all the students are gone. I didn’t believe that for a second but that’s what she told us.” MacLean accused Starbucks upper management of lying to them frequently, including assuring them they would get the hours
they requested. However, MacLean said as soon as there were whispers of unionization, things changed. Employees who had requested a lot of hours were getting much fewer, while students who could only work 12-15 hours were being scheduled for more than 20. MacLean also said that after the store voted to unionize, employees started to get written up regularly for trivial things, which she said they saw as retaliation.
