How about this instead: if the company you are a CxO at has ever once spoken about how sustainable/green/environmental it is, you're not allowed private jets. In fact if the trip doesn't require you to cross an ocean, you can take a bike.
Any violators will be held personally liable with a fine up to 150% of said corporation's global profits
Part of this has a decent reason: If fuel is much cheaper in e.g. Dubai, airlines will chock their planes full of fuel instead of the optimised amount, leading to overburning of fuel due to excessive transportation of it.
And the opposite, they will skimp on fuel going inbound to there. Of course fuel qty is the captain's decision, however a lot of airlines already pressure those. As one example Ryanair had a "list of shame" of captains bringing too much safety fuel in their eyes.
Exactly. And the old story of "oh well the rich will take their money elsewhere" won't work. They need to stay in the US, that's the whole point.
Maybe there will be a point where it works out cheaper to fly to another country to fuel up though. I'm sure some tax policy folks could figure this out better than I.
Tax the ~~rich~~ ultra-wealthy, and their thoughtless damage to our environment. It's about as close to a victimless tax-rise as could ever exist.
The building of the jets, the material extraction, the maintenance, the work around growing the fuels, the processing, the transportation, most of that is not fully sustainable.
It's only "less bad" for the climate crisis, not better. Definitely not perfect.
There are so few lords, it doesn't make sense for them to change their livestyles. But we peasants are numerous, so we are the ones who must suffer austerity and reduce our standard of living. That's why it's good for these rich people to fly around in private jets to attend conferences about the virtue of making common folks eat bugs and walk everywhere.
This isn't exaggeration either [1], 300+ jets to a climate meeting discussing how they will restrictively control our lives to reduce emissions. The people proposing these rules are unwilling to change their lifestyle to help the environment, meanwhile your neighbour Joe Bloggs drives his car because he has to get to work to pay for all of these green taxes, which he gets more tax for because he can't afford an electric car.
Having to walk limits your employment opportunities, particularly if you're not able to just pick up your life and move homes. It also limits which stores and other businesses you're able to reach; less competition means you end up paying more for goods and services. If you're a yuppy living this lifestyle by choice, able to change apartments on a whim and rent a car whenever you need to go to costco and able to shrug off higher prices in local shops anyway, then it's all good. But for the average member of the working class, quite possibly with a mortgage and kids in school, being forced into this kind of rootless urban pedestrian lifestyle is a raw deal.
One of the first things I'd bring back if I were him, seen them creeping back in a lot of coffee shops and no one complains when they do, not to mention bubble tea shops which are growing in popularity all have plastic.
Straws are the answer to drinking through a lid, which is the real necessity for takeout restaurants. Costco figured this out with a self-sealing flap on the lid you can sip from.
That said, it's all window dressing. As a kid I drank from paper cups with plastic straws. An iced coffee from some restaurants is now a massive plastic cup with a paper straw.
Not a great way to drink milkshakes, they're too viscous to drink straight from the cup. Paper straws collapse on themselves due to the low pressure inside the tube combined with weakened structural integrity due to moisture flowing into the paper. I wish I could say it sucks, but it doesn't sadly.
The problem is that without a straw to mediate the max volume you can move, you end up with a massive blob of viscous liquid. When you get enough of an angle to start it moving, it will move as one and end up all over your face.
I drink a milkshake occasionally, non-caffeinated (just plain old vanilla), from a local place, I'm not obese and I'm not from America. Why are you setting up a straw man and getting upset about it?
I guess technically, this whole comment section is just straw man arguments.
But aside from the pun, we're talking about Starbucks. That is supposed to be a coffee/espresso business. You should be able to drink those without a straw. The fact that espresso milkshakes are so overwhelmingly popular that people require straws from Starbucks in America really isn't a straw man argument, it is entirely relevant. If people weren't buying milkshakes from an espresso stand, they wouldn't need straws. I certainly don't need a straw for any variety of normal espresso. The fact that daily caffeinated milkshakes are normalized in America is very likely linked with our obesity crisis.
They also require plastic see-through containers so that people can visually see the layers on their milkshake.
We'd be doing better if that didn't exit or was considered much more niche rather than entirely mainstream.
I thought we were on a tangent that relates to the new Starbucks CEO's commuting habits as compared to us plebeians who have to make do with paper straws to spare the environment. I guess obesity caused by Starbucks milkshakes tangentially relates to that in turn, but I wouldn't call it entirely relevant. As far as your point goes I agree, as a European I had no idea Starbucks espresso milkshakes were even a thing and it doesn't surprise me at all that a daily Big Gulp of sugar and caffeine makes people fat. People can do whatever they want, but I wouldn't.
Aside from the reasons others have provided, a not-insubstantial number of people can't use their mouth: for reasons of disability or other, they cannot produce enough suction with their mouth alone.
Once upon a time, women wore heavy, probably toxic lipstick that smudged and smeared a lot on cups.
Also, some people drink coffee, tea, acidic, and/or sugary drinks from straws for dental cosmetic or health reasons.
Finally, disability or convenience reasons.
Maybe we all just need to start bringing a titanium folding sporf and a metal straw with us wherever we go and do away entirely with some single use plastics and their substandard, compostable imposters.
For me the amount of ice in e.g. Mcdonald's drinks hurts my teeth if I have to drink from the cup. And no, you can't order it without ice here in Europe. All orders go through a machine and you can't customise this.
It's also much easier to drink on the go without spilling.
Here in Spain you can only order on the portal screens anymore (the only thing you can do at the desk is to pay if you only have cash). And there are no ice modification options there. You can only modify some of the burgers.
I didn't realise that in other countries they still have staffing where you can order. But I bet that will be changed soon too. They recently rebuilt all the restaurants here to make this change.
The good thing is that they have table service now though.
No, you are right - the orders are more and more taken via screens (not everywhere but almost).
But for some fast food places you can edit your order (BK, KFC if I remember well) and for those where you can't (McDonalds I think) I go to the counter with my command and say "no ice please" and it always worked.
Yeah true, BK has always advertised with customisation options so I'm not surprised they do allow this. I don't have one near me so I don't go there so much.
But I didn't realise I could ask at the desk to modify my order once it's placed. Thanks!
Someone needs to make a decision to raise the starbucks coffee prices 2x. Finally, here's the actual reason. No one can blame him: his commute is really long! And someone will pay for it. /S
As most things CEO's do it will be a flippant display that will last about as long as a lettuce out of the fridge. However, those below will be expected to show evidence the rules are followed because there's nothing quite like cascading punishment, because that's the fun part of being a shitty boss, watching people suffer because they say so.
Look for teams that are flexible about remote work, those are the bosses you want to work for in this current day and age.
Every time I read one of these "back on site to do work" style posts, yet we'll offshore at the drop of a hat, it infuriates me as I can't see sense in the logic.
Starbucks mandates that everyone be in the office 3 days a week, so does the CEO. OK, he gets to fly into the office, but it is still a very long commute, probably 2-3 hours each way, so I wouldn't envy the guy that much.
What bothers me more that he's burning so much fuel for no real reason, just to reinforce this stupid internal rule. That's really the worst reason to do it.
Most of starbucks already works "in the office" 5 days a week because they work in a coffeeshop which can't be remote anyway.
> What bothers me more that he's burning so much fuel for no real reason
So are we, only that are far less important; and we're aren't paid in millions. Everything can be done from home. But, no: we must commute and "collaborate" the shit out of each other.
I am sure that Starbucks will find a way to offset those emissions that the Jet will release to the planet, right? If they need him so badly (and I don't doubt about his skills or his ability to deliver) they can arrange a schedule with him that will get him a few continuous days per month in a hotel in Seattle, a few days per month travelling abroad (which is part of the JD) and a few days from home. But commuting with a jet is outrageous.
That's a very big "given" with no evidence. ESG statements are the sort of thing that should be regarded with extreme skepticism, as are carbon offsets.
Personally, my biggest concerns are environmental impact and a waste of money that could have been used in many other ways (lower product prices, improve products, increase employee compensation etc).
I have no reason to doubt that the new CEO deserves his compensation package but we don't deserve all those emissions in our environment. And I am sure many employees deserve a few extra dollars per hour for their hard work!
"Carbon offset", e.g. somebody who owns a lot of property with trees says he's totally, hypothetically, going to chop down those trees except actually he's going to sell some carbon credits instead. High likelihood he was never going to chop down the trees in the first place, or does so anyway and it's only 10 years later that anybody even notices. Oh, but there are ways to audit this they say! Auditors can look at the deforestation rates of neighboring properties to estimate the hypothetical averted deforestation caused by the sale of the carbon credits. And the guy who sold the carbon credits can pay his neighbors to chop down trees to pass this audit.
It's all a scam. A system by which rich people swap money back and forth with other rich people to absolve themselves of the climate sin they claim the rest of us are burdened with.
Yes there is. Offset is not a sustainable method, it just shifts the blame to someone else, and fuels aren't the only CO2 emitted by an airplane (other points are the manufacture, maintenance, logistics etc).
Also, you don't really get to choose what you fuel your private plane up with. Most places only provide plain Jet-A1. An airline has the regularity and scale to organise this themselves, a private operation surely doesn't.
Also who is paying for the three times a week personal jet flights?
Edit: Nevermind the article says corporate jet. Silly me. Imagine Starbucks even paying the gas for a serf to commute to their job, much less the vehicle.
the article didn't go into numbers, but $20k each way, or $40k each day is a reasonable estimate of how much it'll cost to have that commute. 3x per week is $120k/wk; * 50 is $600k/ yr.
assume his salary is the $1.6 + $3.6 million, or $5.2 million (from the article), or 11% of his salary. if you made $100k/yr, that would be like spending $11k/yr on gas driving to and from work, or $900/month. which is 6x as much as $150, which is very roughly what I spend on gas commuting per month.
He also goes 3 days per week at the office. The fact that he has a plane for that is irrelevant. It is the same as blaming VPs for having drivers and they don't do their own driving to work.
The higher you are on the corporate ladder, the better the perks. And if the board of Starbucks acquiesced to his demands, I don't see why everybody is up in arms about it.
I'm happy that the people that I work for pay for my gas to come to work :)
Starbucks wanted/needed a new CEO because the previous one was mismanaging the company, and Niccols is the best Restaurant CEO in the industry, having lead Chipotle's turnaround.
Niccols was in a position to make his own demands, and Starbucks had no choice but to comply.
Niccols even became chairman of the Starbucks board (it's very rare for a CEO to also be the chairman of the board at this size of a company).
Already he's paying off by jumping SBUX stock from $75 to $94 just based on the announcement alone.
If you're truly indispensable and critical to the operation of a company, they will let you work however you want.
Niccols also has to deliver, otherwise he'll be ousted like Laks was after barely a year.
I guess their stock price is doing well, but have you been to a Chipotle lately? The stores here are understaffed and food quality seems to have gone down from what I remember from a decade ago when I went there frequently.
Yep. Went from $200 to a height of $3000 under Niccols before they initiated a stock split.
That's the job of a CEO at this size of an organization.
Starbucks and most other restaurant companies are majority owned by larger funds, and Elliot Investment Management is one of the major shareholders in SBUX now.
I agree with you about the degradation of Chipotle's burritos, but for companies like this, the share is the product that matters, not the burrito or coffee.
Most people go to fast food for convenience, not the experience, and the margins are so low that it's difficult to be cash-flow positive, making investor relations extremely critical.
Starbucks should really work on making their stores remote. Maybe some sort of postal delivery system where prepared ingredients are delivered in customer homes and then they just make them at home. These could be produced by remote workers working from home and then batches shipped point-to-point even.
One wonders. If they did a search of the Seattle metropolitan area, how many candidates would they find that would have the chops to do, just as good, if not a better job than this one CEO?
I understand why you cannot just pick a random person to be a CEO. But in theory, there are probably many people who have the leadership skills and industry insight to be really good CEOs of Starbucks, and probably for a much cheaper compensation package. It's just the bureaucracy of having to somehow justify the selection of a CEO to the board, forces the company to select from a tiny pool of CEOs many of them with a checkered record. One of the many ridiculous things that we do as a society.
> One wonders. If they did a search of the Seattle metropolitan area, how many candidates would they find that would have the chops to do, just as good, if not a better job than this one CEO?
The thing with CEOs is that you don't really buy performance. A lot of them are actually not very good at their job. But you buy their old boys network.
Don’t discount the opportunity cost. Starbucks might have lost many times more if they delayed the CEO change. The new guy saved Chipotle so he’s a very good bet.
I'd bet He wont be beyond a month or so for appearance's sake. then it'll just be remote meeting and maybe a company leased house locally for a day or so to look 'in'. these type of stories do almost no followup.
Is he actually flying back and forth 3 times a week? I assume he's flying to Seattle and staying at a company owned condo for 3 days, then back home. That's how the place I work for did it when our CEO lived in Chicago.
I'm wondering how many corporate campus HQs have (or are near to) runways and how many CEOs live in private aviation communities, e.g., able to fly door-to-door.
This reminded me of Pascal Husting, a director of Greenpeace (!) who commuted from Luxembourg to Amsterdam by flying up and down several times a month. It completely soured my opinion of Greenpeace, and I've avoided donating ever since.
I just looked up the aftermath, and it turns he stopped flying his commute in 2014, and switched to the train in response to the criticism. It's interesting that a poorly judged action could do quite a lot of long term reputational damage, caused in part — I suspect — by initially defending that choice.
What soured my opinion of Greenpeace is how they kept us burning fossil fuels for decades longer than we should have been, with their anti-nuclear propaganda. I don't know if that was paid for by fossil fuel companies, but it sure really suited them.
Greenpeace did untold damage to the climate by campaigning against nuclear (and, implicitly, for fossil fuels, as there weren't other economically competitive eco-friendly choices back then).
Greenpeace anti-nuclear campaigning came from the "peace" in their name: the inextricable link of nuclear energy with nuclear weapons. Their campaign against nuclear weapons testing was met with considerable violence and carried out at significant personal risk, culminating in the French government carrying out a terrorist attack in New Zealand resulting in the death of a Greenpeace member. You cannot accuse them of being paid actors in that era. https://www.greenpeace.org/aotearoa/about/our-history/bombin...
There was also a lot of campaigning against the practice of dumping nuclear waste at sea. I think we're long enough past Chernobyl to have forgotten the impact of that on Europe, but perhaps if a stray shell hits the Zaporizhzhia or Kursk nuclear reactor we'll be reminded of that again.
> perhaps if a stray shell hits the Zaporizhzhia or Kursk nuclear reactor we'll be reminded of that again.
We don't use graphene reactors anymore, so at worst we will experience a Fukushima-level event. And by that I mean what was expected from Fukushima in the worst-case scenario which did not happen (still, people in the exclusion zone were forcibly moved out of their houses)
The pollution from Fukushima into the ocean was huge. It's not only about human death counts.
And yes the same reactors as in Chernobyl are still in operation today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK#List_of_RBMK_reactors . Including in Kursk where fighting between Russia and Ukraine is currently going on. This isn't an imaginary situation.
They were mitigated to avoid this particular issue but I wouldn't consider them 'safe' without a containment building etc.
And it's not graphene, it's graphite. Graphene is a nanomaterial that didn't exist for production during the envisioning of RBMK reactors. It was only theoretical and produced from 2004 onwards.
Thats the thing with reputation - hard to gradually win, trivial to lose for good if you do something completely against the values you try to project as your core ones.
Greenpeace specifically has little sympathies - they often fulfill the definition of eco-terrorists. Its like those idiots spraying beautiful old masters paintings worth tens of millions to 'send strong ecological message so people wake up'. Well, network protocol failed on that sending, you just painted yourself as arrogant aggressive a-holes I want to have absolutely nothing with, harming the cause significantly.
While I'm defending Greenpeace, I'm convinced that Extinction Rebellion are an 'op' run by UK security services because of how counterproductive they are.
My gut says otherwise, given the apparent decentralised structure and international range, making them difficult for a secret hand to guide while also being more prone to any one local group having their own Leeroy Jenkins.
That said, I've seen the inside of the American Green Party, and what I saw had vibes of someone deliberately following the CIA guide to organisational sabotage — though even then, also a lot of amateurs with no idea how small and irrelevant they are and thus obliviously attempting to directly change the whole world rather than focus on what they actually have the power to influence, and I suspect that was where the majority of their mistakes came from.
(Also a few genuine experts who were busy trying to sort out the internal issues, but "busy" tends to also mean "quiet").
Which makes you wonder, in what kind of world do those people live to not see the irony of being the Greenpeace CEO and traveling several times a month by using a airplane?
The guy's clueless, but to be fair to him, I just looked up the travel time between Luxembourg and Amsterdam by train and it's around 7.5 hours, so I can see why he wouldn't want to travel that way when a plane is much faster. Even traveling that distance by car is faster! (~4.5h) Honestly, that kind of travel time by train is just shameful.
Meanwhile, just over the border, traveling between various mid-size German cities by ICE train is very quick, and roughly 2x as fast as driving. Even between Brussels and Amsterdam is reasonably quick (~2h on Eurostar), so I guess the problem is just Luxembourg?
If that guy needed to go to work in Amsterdam, the proper solution would have been to move.
I used to do the same train commute weekly for some time. Yes, it's terrible.
But from what I have heard there was a direct high-speed connection until a few years ago. Allegedly this was suppressed because they could not reach an agreement with the Belgian SNCB who demanded the high-speed train did some extra stops.
Compare a graduate, wearing a suit, walking around streets in the summer, trying to get work at any company that will hire him for programming, then any cafe that will just let him serve drinks, and still not get hired. Compare this smart kid, who might have not got a perfect grade due to unforeseen circumstances, smart , intelligent, willing to do anything, for a job that pays $5 an hour in his field. Compare this 21 year old, to another man, who is CEO , of a company, that somehow exists solely to protect the planet, through humanitys good will. Now imagine that 21 year old, not moving to amsterdam, to live in a flat, to do his best for not just his peers, and respect to the company, but for the "good side" of every well meaning, often poor citizen willing to help improve the planet. Imagine this kid saying, nah I rather fly in a jet, that helps destroy the environment, and inconvenience my peers, and cost everyone involved with me and the company just so I can be closer to my garden.
It doesn't come down to whether the CEO train timetable is slightly out of whack. Its literally everything. Some humans exist and grew on a plane of existence so different to the reality of the greater majority, that its often too hard for them to even comprehend it.
I'm not bitter really, I retired young. But I could never bring myself to be that CEO, even now that I have money.
This isn't a humble brag I'm just explaining how alien some peoples lives are, including most of you, with your 6 figure salaries compared to the "norm". Just a friendly reminder. /rant
I mean if you dig into any of these "non-profits"/NGOs the behavior seems entirely par for the course and it's more expected that they be filled with people like that.
The good thing about these global chains is that you see the logo anywhere in the world and you know exactly what to expect inside. Other that that, yes, Starbucks (and Stars Coffee it became here in Russia) is just a massively overpriced coffee shop. There always are cheaper and better ones.
It's because of familiarity. It's why we have Starbucks in Spain at all, because of all the tourists. Because Starbucks coffee totally sucks compared to real Spanish coffee :) What Americans consider coffee is more like a milkshake containing some coffee flavour :') And that's very hard to find in Spain where the espresso/"cafe solo" rules (or cortado with a bit of milk) so tourists end up gravitating to Starbucks.
Because the local organic free-range kenyan pour-over place that serves me coffee in a biodegradable urn along with a kale-based "eco brownie" and some indie hip-hop playing at volume 11 doesn't have a drive-thru, obvs :)
Starbucks commitment to sustainability is a total BS if their CEO commutes from home to work 1000 miles (almost) daily on a private jet. What is his carbon footprint anyway?
