Starbucks

1. How does Starbucks’ approach to social responsibility relate too the three concepts of social responsibility described in the text?

As we learned in Chapter 4, the three concepts to social responsibility are, profit responsibility, stockholder responsibility and societal responsibility. While more companies are shifting their operations and missions towards being more socially responsible, Starbucks’ approach to social responsibility is quite different and unique compared to other comparable companies: Starbucks’ number one priority is to make its customers, communities it serves in and employees happy, instead of maximizing shareholders’ wealth. Shareholders wealth will be maximized as a result of the social responsible ways Starbucks utilizes in running its business.

Starbucks considers its employees partners, by offering to its full time and part time employees health care benefits and stock options. In addition, Starbucks closely monitors the demographics of its workforce, therefore ensuring there is adequate diversity so to reflect the communities in which Starbucks operates, and as a result bringing in more customers who appeal to the culture and the friendly baristas. The workforce diversity and the ownership in stock further motivates the employees to become more responsible, better serve the customers, work hard to increase revenue, and ultimately increase Starbucks’ brand equity and its social responsibility image.

While Starbucks emphasizes the importance of happy employees, it is also highly committed to provide its customers excellent experiences every time they visit the store. All of its employees are well trained not only to make coffee and operate the coffee machines but to be pleasant with the customers. One of their training strategies is to not only make eye contact with the customer but carefully explain to them the various coffee flavors and blends. Feedback from customers is highly utilized in order to learn more about the...