I’m in Starbucks a lot, for the same reason that Mark Zuckerberg wears the same t-shirt every day: My dog still has puppy energy, and when she wants to play and I want to work, I have a hard time telling her no.
I’ve noticed, in these Starbucks, a number of people wearing scrubs. At first, I thought this was because the population of nurses overlaps heavily with the population of people with cutesy “Don’t talk to me ‘til I’ve had my coffee!!” signs in their kitchen. Then, I realized nurses probably have messed up sleep schedules because of the twelve-hour shifts. Then, I realized I live close to a lot of hospitals, and have for the entire time I’ve had the dog. The nurses probably isn’t a Starbucks thing. The nurses is probably a neighborhood thing.
Obviously, then, I have absolutely no way to know if Starbucks is intentionally looking for hospitals the way CVS always puts itself right across the street from Walgreens. (Or vice versa? Also, kind of a bad analogy. Symbiosis instead of competition. Although…wow. It would be really “Don’t talk to me ‘til I’ve had my coffee!!” if someone went to Starbucks when they needed to go to the hospital. And yes, I do think coffee probably sends people to the hospital. In indirect ways.)
I suspect, however, that Starbucks is not doing this. And here’s why:
It’s not open 24/7.
If the goal of Starbucks is to keep nurses caffeinated amidst and between funky shifts, they’d do a better job of it. The invisible hand would reach down, unlock those doors, and fire up the espresso machines when Caitie from TikTok is halfway through an overnight shift. They would not be able to close at 5 PM, or 8 PM, or whenever it is that Starbuckses close. (I don’t think there’s a uniform time for this.) They would be open all night long. Forever. In perpetuity. Churning out drinks, one smile at a time.
This was the second post in what’s so far been an unplanned two-part series exploring Starbucks’s business practices. For the first, click here.
