A very special note from Sprudge Editorial:
News broke last week that Starbucks had fired its CEO Laxman Narasimhan. This news caught the financial world by surprise but that’s nothing compared to the latest development, as CNBC reports that new CEO Brian Niccol will be commuting to Seattle from California three times a week by private jet. (!!!)
This bombshell reporting left all us here at Sprudge HQ (where there is no current private jet access) positively stupefied. That is, until we received a leaked copy of a secret communique from deep inside Starbucks HQ.
We’ve made the bold decision to publish this confidential (and defensible under the satire interpretation of the 1st amendment) communique in full, as it contains relevant information for those following the new Starbucks CEO saga. The following is presented without comment.
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DEAR MR. NICCOL,
We here at Starbucks are over the moon that you will be joining our team as CEO in September. You’ve proven through your rice bowl austerity measures and literal bean counting at Chipotle—the ole “Niccol and Dime” as it’s now referred to in the halls of corporate foodstuffs power—that you’re the perfect person not named Howard Schultz to run the company. In his short time with us, former CEO Mr. Narasimhan simply didn’t have the fortitude to overcome the constant public undermining from his predecessor, and ultimately our profits suffered because of it. (We are required by corporate fealty bylaw to reaffirm that Mr. Schultz is in no way at fault here, nor has he ever done anything wrong ever, up to and including his years-long footsie with running for president. All Hail Schultz.)
We’re confident that, in the face declining sales, offering you upwards of $113 million dollars—over four times what we paid whats-his-name—will certainly bring about a new era of prosperity. You gotta spend money to make money, although do make sure to have your team of attorneys review the fine print in your signing documents, as they do proportionally allocate a leveraged percentile of your incoming benefits package through the Bank of Unused Gift Cards.
We are writing you today, Mr. Niccol, to inform you of a company policy of which you may not have yet been made aware. We’re a family here at Starbucks corporate, Brian—that’s what we’ll put on your cup—and as such we are all equal. You may be the head of the household, but under this roof, we all must follow the same rules. From the CEO to the receptionist, all are the same under His Watchful Eye and Trademark Wisdom. (Hail Schultz.)
And as such, you must abide the company’s hybrid work schedule and be at the Seattle headquarters no fewer than three days a week. We therefore insist that you use the Starbucks Corporate Jet—affectionately referred to as the Seven-Venti-Seven—so that you may supercommute from your Newport Beach, California home to Seattle multiple times a week.
Let’s talk pre-made turkey sandwich here, Brian. Here at Starbucks there are two pillars upon which our entire business is founded, and it is our unwavering dedication to them that has allowed us to succeed where others have failed. Those pillars are: people and sustainability. It’s why we’ve given millions to coffee producers who have been underpaid by cruel corporate coffee buyers for decades (full disclosure: they are us). And it’s why we fight tooth and nail at every turn to keep our partners from falling prey to the evils of collective bargaining. Without people, we’d just be a pile of green aprons on the ground, and then’d who’d make the coffee? Robots? (We’re going to need you to get under an NDA first before we tell you about the robots.)
More important than the people, though, is our commitment to sustainability. We’ve only got one planet, Brian, so we have to take care of it. If you don’t think we love sustainability, we’d ask that you read any of the 600-plus articles on our website with the word “sustainability” in it somewhere. It’s a great word, sustainability, because it succinctly encapsulates how committed we at Starbucks are making the world a better place. It’s a bit clunky, though. Doesn’t quite roll off the tongue. And saying “sustainability” is perhaps paramount to the act itself. If a sustainability happens in the woods and there’s not PR team to write about it, did it even happen?
That’s why we hope you’ll work on your diction during those six 1,000-mile trips to and from work each week. Luckily, you’ll be all alone on that big jet plane, so there shouldn’t be anyone there to make you feel self-conscious while you are practicing. We need you to be so in tune with the word “sustainability” that you can hear the faint whisper of rainforests growing over the sound of the fossil fuel-burning jet engines on either side of you. It’s like we like to say on one of our other private jets, the Spruce Shultz: you can’t spell CEO without CO2, and you can’t get one back and forth to work without emitting 24 tons of it either.
We’d also ask that you stay mum about this whole jet thing. It’s the optics of it, you see. We don’t want to have to fire another CEO due to declining sales. A brand that constantly leverages sustainability to burnish its image would look so unbelievably stupid if something like this came out in an SEC filing. Can you even imagine?
Hail Schultz,
Starbucks
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
