Don't say anything but...

For this blog entry you will need to know how Starbucks works. Not in the three-day-orientation-training kind of way, but in the kind of need-to-know way I'm about to impart...

First you want to know that Starbucks stores in the US are almost all corporately owned.

There are Starbuckses in book stores and in airports and though these look like any other Starbucks they're actually licensed. In short Starbucks leases the logo and the brand and the supply chain and the recipes to the individual store and the store operates independently of Starbucks. This means that Starbucks giftcards are not accepted there and that I don't get a discount, either.

So that's store ownership.

When you start you begin as a barista. This means that you take orders and make drinks. Bottom of the totem. If you excel there you might get to be Shift Supervisor which is what I am. You're responsible for the safe, the tills, employee safety - pretty much everything up to making strategy rather than operations decisions.
After that you go to Assistant Manager, Manager and, if you do well enough, you get to oversee the management of a group of stores as a District Manager, a group of districts as Regional Director and so on and so forth right up to the good management jobs in Seattle.

Well, my District Manager told me today that he wants me to apply for an Assistant Manager job at a busy mall store. It'll mean long hours, yes, and hard work too, no doubt - but the money is a hefty step up. Basically it'd be around a 50% pay increase for me which is good.

So I've been pretty jovial all day since, in my experience, you don't generally get told you ought to apply unless they think you're going to be given the job and applying for it just satisfies the requirement that you applied for it in the first place.

That's all. I'm excited to be going away for a few days and excited that I might have a new job when I get back.

It's nice that, for once, things seem to be going really well...