New York Upholds Tip Sharing By Starbucks Assistant Managers

I had a smart aleck friend who tried to come up with the Starbucks coffee order that had the greatest number of syllables.  I can't remember the winning combination, but it definitely had the words "half-caf" and "cinnamon", some sort of milk substitute, and a very long word ending with the letters "iato."  He largely gave up, however, when he and I sat near the counter at a Starbucks next to a local university and half the students ordered drinks with not appreciably shorter names as a matter of course.

Given this daily act of caffeinated alchemy, it shouldn't be any surprise that Starbucks plotted a similarly difficult course in having certain supervisory employees participate in tip pools in a recent set of class action cases before the New York Court of Appeals and the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.