Starbucks’s New CEO Is Under Fire for His Private-Jet Commute From SoCal to Seattle

The new CEO of Starbucks is getting some pushback, but it has nothing to do with coffee.

Brian Niccol, who was recently installed as the head of the chain, will commute via private jet to the company’s Seattle offices from his home in Newport Beach, California, The New York Times reported on Thursday. He’ll use Starbucks’s corporate plane to make the 1,000-mile journey, according to his offer letter and contract, which the company filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“Remote work for C.E.O.s is one of the tools you can use to recruit a new C.E.O. who might not be willing to relocate to the company’s headquarters,” Denis Sosyura, a finance professor at Arizona State University who studies corporate governance, told the Times. “If you have a C.E.O. who really likes living in Southern California, it’s very difficult to recruit them away.”

The documents add that Niccol will not be required to relocate to Seattle, but he will have to find permanent secondary housing in the city within three months of his start date. Starbucks’s current return-to-work policy sees corporate employees working from the office at least three days a week, according to The New York Times.

This sort of so-called super-commuting isn’t uncommon when it comes to corporate execs. A study undertaken by Sosyura and Boston College professor Ran Duchin prior to the pandemic found that more than 17 percent of public companies had a remote CEO at some point, the Times wrote. That includes places like Wells Fargo, where Charles Scharf oversaw the San Francisco–based bank from New York, and Boeing, where Dave Calhoun commuted to the headquarters on a private plane.

Still, the practice doesn’t sit well with many people—especially when it’s happening at a place like Starbucks, which is making most of its employees commute to its headquarters during the week and claims to care a lot about sustainability.

“Consumers seem to care about these things more these days than before. You’re buying a narrative. You’re not just buying the coffee,” Duchin told The New York Times. “This is an implicit stand on issues like sustainability.”

Despite the hullabaloo surrounding Niccol’s commute, he does so far seem to be having a positive effect on the struggling coffee chain: Starbucks’s stock price rose an impressive 25 percent immediately upon the news of his hire, adding $20 million to the company’s market value, the Times noted. And it’s a good thing he’ll have easy access to all that caffeine while he flies back and forth between Newport Beach and Seattle for the foreseeable future.