An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers@guardian.co.tt

Trinida­di­an pa­trons of Star­bucks are now pay­ing up to ten per cent more for their favourite drinks and sand­wich­es at the US cof­fee fran­chise.

Si­mon Hardy, chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of Pres­tige Hold­ings, which holds the fran­chise for Star­bucks in Trinidad, said the price in­crease was as a re­sult of the in­crease in the na­tion­al min­i­mum wage and high­er in­put costs for the brand's pre­mi­um in­gre­di­ents.

The price in­creas­es took ef­fect on Jan­u­ary 2.

A blog­ger on Face­book post­ed on Jan­u­ary 12 that Star­bucks in­creased its prices by 25 per cent. This caused so­cial me­dia to buzz last week in­to this week as peo­ple were up in arms over the in­crease, with some say­ing that it did not sound ac­cu­rate as 25 per cent is a huge jump in the grand scheme of things.

On Mon­day, Guardian Me­dia reached out to Hardy, who cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly de­nied that prices at the cof­fee house had gone up by 25 per cent. But he did say that prices of all items had been in­creased across the board.

Hardy out­lined that for the hot drinks - the Amer­i­cano (i.e. a black cof­fee) for the grande size in­creased by $1.

For the Café Mocha (hot) the price in­creased by $2.

On the cold side - a grande caramel frap­puc­ci­no (the blend­ed cream-based drink) went up by $3. A grande Cook­ie and Crème went up by $2. A tall vanil­la Chai Lat­te went up by $2.

He in­di­cat­ed that bak­ery items on av­er­age went up by $2, while sand­wich­es in­creased be­tween $3 to $5.

Hardy said the price in­creas­es were part­ly due to in­put cost in­creas­es from Star­bucks In­ter­na­tion­al, along with the $3 an hour in­crease in the min­i­mum wage to $20.50 an hour, which took ef­fect on Jan­u­ary 1.

Hardy said the last in­crease at the lo­cal Star­buckks op­er­a­tions was Feb­ru­ary 2023, but he could not give a per­cent­age fig­ure or dol­lar val­ue at the time.

Asked if Star­bucks has be­gun to ex­pe­ri­ence any neg­a­tive fall­out due to the in­creas­es, Hardy said “It's too ear­ly to tell cus­tomer re­ac­tion but we have not seen wide­spread neg­a­tive re­ac­tion.”

Ques­tioned if there would be any job loss­es as a re­sult of the min­i­mum wage in­crease, he said, “No, we are look­ing to ex­pand the num­ber of Star­bucks restau­rants.”

Star­bucks opened its doors in Trinidad in San Fer­nan­do in 2016 and now has 16 Star­bucks cafes in T&T and one in Guyana.

In its con­sol­i­dat­ed unau­dit­ed re­sults for the nine months end­ed Au­gust 31, 2023, Pres­tige Hold­ings Ltd, the restau­rant man­age­ment com­pa­ny that op­er­ates fran­chis­es such as KFC and Star­bucks, record­ed $987 mil­lion in sales. That was a 22 per cent in­crease when com­pared to the same pe­ri­od last year.

For the pe­ri­od Pres­tige Hold­ings earned an af­ter-tax prof­it of $42.35 mil­lion.

“Dur­ing the third quar­ter of 2023, op­er­at­ing per­for­mance at Pres­tige Hold­ings con­tin­ued the strong trend ex­pe­ri­enced dur­ing the first two quar­ters, dri­ven by im­prove­ments in sales and op­er­at­ing ef­fi­cien­cies across all brands. We have ex­pe­ri­enced im­prove­ments in our dine-in chan­nel in many of our restau­rants and our dig­i­tal, dri­ve-thru, and de­liv­ery chan­nels con­tin­ue to con­tribute sig­nif­i­cant­ly to our over­all busi­ness,” said Pres­tige Hold­ings’ chair­man Chris­t­ian Mout­tet.