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Starbucks CEO Won’t Cut Benefits in Advance of Affordable Care Act

Schultz
Schultz Photo: Getty Images

Many businesses are finding sneaky ways to get out of providing health insurance for employees before the Affordable Care Act goes into effect. Lesser companies are keeping employee numbers below 50 or cutting workweeks to less than 30 hours, but Starbucks is emerging as the good guy, at least according to CEO Howard Schultz, who tells Reuters that Starbucks “won’t use the new law as [an] excuse to cut benefits or lower benefits for its workers.” Meanwhile, the coffee chain “will continue maintaining benefits for partners.” (All partners, perhaps.) Starbucks already offers health insurance to part-time employees working twenty hours a week, and Schultz says the company will maintain the policy despite the limit put forth by the new act.

That’s not the only way Starbucks is trying to announce itself today as the overpriced coffee brand that cares. They may have us shelling out five bucks for a latte, but now that the ever-expanding Starbucks-verse encompasses fancy croissants and then some, it’s only natural for those products to start becoming available outside of the chain’s locations: Starbucks’ Evolution Juice is set to go on sale at Whole Foods nationwide. Meanwhile, just so all of the bases are covered, the chain would also like to remind you that it’s environmentally conscious: Starbucks is set to open a string of retail locations in refurbished shipping containers. Now if only they’d start making Starbucks-branded hooch from all those spent House Blend grounds.


Starbucks won’t cut worker benefits ahead of Obamacare: CEO
[Reuters]
Starbucks ‘container’ store drops in [Portland Business Journal]
Starbucks makes a move into Whole Foods [USAT]
Earlier: Genius Scientists Figure Out How to Distill Alcohol From Coffee

Starbucks CEO Won’t Cut Benefits in Advance of Affordable Care Act