Starbucks is the latest company to join the great corporate layoff bandwagon, announcing that it will be laying off 1100 employees globally. While CEO Brian Niccol expects a return to a more simplified organizational structure, here’s what we can learn from the coffee-culture titan’s hiring strategy by looking for some insights in the labor market.
Starbucks Corporate Layoffs: How we got here
Starbucks has been through some trying time, with Niccol being the fourth CEO in the last five years. The brand has been witnessing eroding profits, leadership instability, declining sales and a customer base that’s increasingly questioning the reasoning behind charging $6 for a latte. (Forbes)
During this period, labor market insights gathered by JobsPikr places the brand’s hiring strategy as being reasonably stable. Between 2021 and 2022, Starbucks posted nearly 12,000 jobs. However, 2023, saw the company more than double its workforce and hire over 26,000 employees, which it once again nearly doubled in 2024, with over 42,000 job posts.
The same period saw profits grow 7.93% between 2021 and 2022, 12.01% between 2022 and AA2023, and only 1.75% between 2023 and 2024. (Macrotrends).
One of the reasons for Starbucks’ monetary decline is the increased selling and administrative expenses, which includes marketing, rent, and more relevant to this story, employee salaries. A quick look at JobsPikr tells us that median salaries rose between 2021 and 2022, before stagnating for 2023 and 2024. 2025’s salaries see a sharp decline, possibly a step towards reducing operating costs.
For additional context, coffee prices have also fluctuated between $4.5 and $5.6 a kilo since 2020. The same beans sold for around $3 a kilo pre pandemic. (Statista)
Finally, sales growth has also been on a downward trend since 2021, with the company’s sales growing only 0.62% in 2024 (WSJ)
What happened once Niccol took over
This brings us to February 2025, when CEO Brian Niccol announced that the company would be laying off 1100 employees, removing nearly 30% of its menu items, and improving the experience inside its stores (Forbes). ‘Back to Starbucks,’ as Niccol terms it, is meant to get customers inside Starbucks outlets more, and the early signs of this can be seen in the brand’s hiring strategy.
While first-line supervisory roles have been a mainstay of Starbucks’ hiring strategy, the numbers tell a different story. Labor market insights from JobsPikr show that the brand has increased the number of first-line supervisors in its ranks by a large margin in 2024.
Compared to 2023, first-line supervisory jobs at Starbucks rose nearly 1.5 times in 2024, but a majority of these jobs were posted in July. In September, when Niccol took over as CEO, hiring was on average at around 1400 roles between September and November, before picking up again in December, possibly to make up for the increase in foot traffic during the holiday season.
What Starbucks’ hiring strategy for 2025 looks like
Corporate layoffs aside, 2025’s job posts have also seen a decline starting January. While Starbucks had posted nearly 3500 jobs in 2024, that number declined sharply to about 2500 in January 2025, followed by an even steeper decline in February, to about 1100 jobs.
However, this is to be expected as far as Starbucks is concerned as historically, hiring slows at the start of the year, and picks up over the rest of the year. What remains to be seen is what happens over the rest of the year.
That said, Niccol’s vision of a leaner, more profitable Starbucks, is already taking shape. For instance, median salaries for 2025 fell sharply to $36,500 from $49,222 in 2024.
Niccol, in his previous stint at Chipotle orchestrated the brand’s rise. His project, ‘Project Square One,’ aimed at revising the operational standards there, with a focus on increasing throughput. The results of his efforts were that share prices jumped 770% compared to the general S&P 500, and margins were up by just under 10 percentage points (Nation’s Restaurant News).
Attrition at Chipotle was also at an all-time low, with the brand offering benefits like mental healthcare, expanded parental leave, tuition reimbursement, English as a second language classes, pet insurance, matching contributions to 401(k) workers’ student loan repayments, and more. (Nation’s Restaurant News)
With his ‘Return to Starbucks’ idea, Niccol aims to get more customers in the door, the coming months will reveal whether he’s able to pull off three transformations in a row.
About JobsPikr
A lot of the labor market insights covered in this article were created using JobsPikr, a labor market data and insights platform. Users get real-time insights into job demand trends, salary benchmarks, industry hiring patterns and more. JobsPikr also applies machine learning to curate additional information like skills, certifications, benefits, and more.Sign up today and start making informed hiring decisions with AI-powered labor market insights.
