Starbucks is so wrong. The tip is for the person who served you, when you feel that they went above and beyond, at your discretion.
Starbucks is stealing tips from those workers to pay shift managers, instead of paying the managers more themselves. Jeeeezus this is just low.
Starbucks, with all their problems, has its head so far up its coffee grinder, I can’t believe the people in charge there would let this person embarrass them like this.
With what they charge for their lousy coffee, those money grubbing liberals can’t even pay their managers?
There's a jar on the counter that you put the tip in. It is immediately obvious that your tip is intermingled with the other tips, and is not earmarked in anyway specific to anyone who served you. The crew splits the tip jar at shift change.
Since the crew lead (shift manager) was doing pretty much the same work as the rest of the crew in many regards, and is often not distinguishable to the casual customer from the other employees, I don't consider it an outrage that they shared in the tip jar. If the law says they can't, then fine, enforce the law (or argue that this sort of micromanagement human endeavors is no damn business of the government.)
But it's no cause for moral indignation that I can see.
I know less about the common procedures at sit down restaurants, but my impression is that they don't work the way you are describing, either. I believe that the waiters share their tips with the cooks and bus boys.
Such communal sharing of tips seems like a good and common practice to me, when you're dealing with a crew of three to six, sharing substantially equal work.
Communal sharing works, for families, neighbors, groups and teams of people who have to co-operate on a common task, and typically who number less than a dozen. It really is about "teamwork" at that level.
Where we (humans) go wrong is applying it on larger scales. Even for a group as small as the one hundred (the number who set forth on the Mayflower to what we now call Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620), communal sharing is a dismal failure. See further What Really Happened at Plymouth.
Maybe it’s the manager serving you that high priced coffee.
A shift supervisor is not a shift manager. I was a shift supervisor at Starbucks. Basically a shift supervisor oversees the nitty gritty making coffee and handing out pastries, while the salaried managers run the store operations. When it was my shift, I ran it from the bar, I was the one making the drinks.
Tips are disttibuted among all hourly workers, which include shift supervisors. Because all tipable hours, according to Starbucks policy, are those worked by hourly employees who are serving customers. So coffee master training time isn’t tipable, because it’s not serving customers. It makes sense as a policy.
Starbucks pays all its employees above minimum wage, with excellent benefits and stock opprotunities. I worked there so that I could afford health insurance for my children. Although I did qualify for state aid, I had the option of working, because of Starbucks. I was able to work 20 hours a week, 4am to 11am, get home before my husband left for work, and care for my children. Most employees were mothers trying to care for their children.