What are Luckin Coffee's new staffing rules?

Luckin Coffee has rolled out a set of labor-cost measures at store level: shifts are nominally eight hours but only six and a half count as effective work time, one person opens early and one closes at night at lower-sales stores, full-time hiring is frozen, and promotion channels are restricted. Employees say the changes leave them stretched thin.

The adjustments follow the scaling back of the 9.9 campaign, after which store sales dropped noticeably, and March falls in the off-season, pressing both revenue and profit. With income hard to raise, the company cut costs instead. The result has drawn complaints from staff and raised questions about how the changes affect service and the brand's standing with customers.

The February that just passed put many office workers through a whirlwind of chaos—rushing to wrap up work before the Spring Festival, relaxing to the fullest during the holiday, and then facing the return-to-work wave, pulled back and forth by piled-up tasks and post-holiday fatigue. But for frontline employees at Luckin Coffee stores, March did not bring relief—it brought an even harsher round of adjustments. Controlling effective working hours, implementing one-person opening and closing shifts, freezing full-time hiring, and restricting promotion channels—a series of measures to cut labor costs led employees to joke that they did not even qualify as "Luckin slaves," but were more like tireless "Luckin robots." At the same time, after the 9.9 campaign was scaled back, store sales dropped noticeably, and March happens to fall in the off-season, putting both revenue and profit under pressure. With no way to boost income, the company could only cut costs. Employees are full of complaints, the user experience is being tested, and whether brand influence will be weakened as a result has become a focus of outside attention.

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For many office workers, February was a chaotic and exhausting month: first, they worked desperately just to return home early for the holiday; after a brief few days of rest and fun, they ran straight into the "return-to-work wave," and the whole month left them tossed about by task pressure and post-holiday aftereffects, until they could finally breathe a sigh of relief at the end of February.

But among these relieved people, Luckin store workers are not included. The reason is that after seeing the reform plan the company rolled out in March, they generally felt that the old self-mocking term "Luckin slave" was no longer enough—a more fitting name would be "Luckin robot."

According to reports from Luckin store employees, the company recently began controlling store employees' working hours. Nominally, shifts are eight hours, but only six and a half hours are actually counted as effective work time. What crushed employees even more was that starting in March, Luckin implemented a model of one person opening early and one person closing the store—that is, at stores with relatively low sales, one person opens in the early morning and one person closes at night, and during most business hours at such stores, only one employee is on duty at the bar.

Compressed working hours might still be tolerable, but now that store staffing has been further reduced, Luckin's frontline employees are complaining bitterly. Some employees grumble that during work they do not even dare go to the restroom, fearing that the moment they leave, the label printer will keep ringing nonstop; others worry that something unexpected might happen at the bar while they are using the toilet, so they can only squat while staring at the real-time bar surveillance feed on their phones.

In addition, many Luckin employees also revealed that the company recently stopped opening full-time positions for recruitment and is also blocking store employees' promotion channels. This means Luckin is tightening labor costs in all directions, continuing to push down even though existing staffing is already stretched thin.

Employees reported that after the 9.9 campaign was scaled back, store sales fell significantly, and March is also a traditional off-season. Previously, a store might sell five or six hundred cups a day, but after entering March, that could plunge to around two or three hundred cups. With lower sales and no way to raise profits, the path of increasing revenue is blocked, so Luckin can only make an issue of cutting costs, pressing labor costs down again and again.

In the comments section, workers were full of anger and accusation: "There were already so many damn things to do, and now they're controlling work hours! And now they're even doing one-person staffing! If you can't afford it, don't open so many stores! Speechless!" "Luckin, what are you doing?? Did you become poor?? Is the company going bankrupt??" "One line? One person opens early, one person closes. And they still demand timeliness. I'm not Nezha, I don't have three heads and six arms. I'm not Sun Wukong, I can't pull out a monkey hair and get thousands of monkeys."

The resentful Luckin employees said that since work-hour controls began, their already tight incomes have become even more strained. On top of that, the new rules after the reform completely ignore whether employees live or die. Every day they are so exhausted that they fall asleep the moment they get home, their work enthusiasm is worn away, and it is hard to convey positive emotional value to customers anymore.

Judging from recently disclosed financial report data, Luckin's sales far exceed Starbucks China's $3.1 billion, but the scaling back of the 9.9 campaign caused store sales to decline. To improve efficiency, Luckin chose to compress labor costs, perhaps hoping to get through the period of sluggish store sales. However, some netizens also worry that once prices return to normal, Luckin may no longer win consumers over, while Luckin employees remain in a state of constant complaint. As one side wanes and the other waxes, the user experience may take a hit, and brand influence will also be weakened.

Image source: Xiaohongshu

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The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.