It’s spring. Finally. I snapped that photo at DTX today. 5 iced coffee on at a time! Winter is past. I’ve been working on a price/ pay change for a couple months, time to launch it.
This journey started a little over a year ago. There was a lot of conversation about wages in our industry and I decided we just had to change how we pay. The reason: low wages cause instability in the lives of my employees. And this instability gets in the way of their happiness, and the happiness of our customers. I think we’ll all be happier with a future where wages are higher, but it means prices are going to have to be higher as well.
So we started increasing prices. First in December 2015, then a couple more changes in 2016. Unlike others in our industry we’re not hiding these changes. We want the conversation. We know nobody wants to pay more, but we also think you’re all able to understand why this is good for us all. So each price increase has come with a pay increase.
We started at an average wage rate of $10.49/ hour company-wide. This was November 2015. At the time Whole Foods Market had an average wage rate around $11.50, Chipotle was under $10. We were feeling pretty good to pay the way we did.
Then we set our sites on an average wage rate of $20/ hour. That’s where we want to go. But we realize it might take a few years.
Effective Saturday Clover hourly employees will get a $0.25/ hour increase. This will apply to all except Provisional Employees. And leaders who are paid hourly (Assistant Managers, Team Leaders, Store Communication Leads, Lead Prep) will all be eligible for an additional $1/ hour that will be determined by a monthly customer experience inspection at their restaurant. If their restaurant passes they will all get an additional $1 for every hour worked that calendar month, applied retroactively as a bonus.
One more notable change that will be reflected in the latest Clover Employee Guide is that we’re doing away with tenure based raises. Looking back at the past 2 years we’ve beat the tenure-based raises with our company-wide raises. So they don’t make sense to track and we’re doing away with the tenure-based stuff.
So we’re not at $20/ hour yet. But this change will bring us up to around $13.50/ hour. That’s a 30% increase in pay in a little more than 1 year!
| Role | Current Pay (4/14/17) | New Pay (effective 4/15/17) |
| Assistant Manager | $16.00 | $16.25 |
| Clover Guide | $12.00 | $12.25 |
| In-store Communicaiton Lead | $15.00 | $15.25 |
| Lead Prep | $15.00 | $15.25 |
| Prep | $12.00 | $12.25 |
| Provisional Employee | $11.00 | $11.00 |
| Team Leader | $14.50 | $14.75 |
| Team Member | $11.50 | $11.75 |
| Truck General Manager | $16.00 | $16.25 |
A huge thank you to our customers. If you didn’t understand and support this move we wouldn’t be successful. And a congratulations to our staff. Who are doing amazing work every day allowing us to continue to grow this business. Thanks all!
The price increases are impact the following items on the Clover menu. Note that we are piloting a DECREASE to the price of one of our hot coffees. This is currently in testing at 3 restaurants:
| Item | Old Price | New (current) Price | |
| Sandwiches | $7.70 | $7.94 | |
| Platters | $8.64 | $8.88 | |
| Mushroom sandwiches | $10.28 | $10.75 | |
| Mushroom platters | $11.21 | $11.68 | |
| Soup | $3.50 | $3.97 | |
| French fries | $4.21 | $4.44 | |
| Coffee: C1 | $3.27 | $2.80 | (Note: decrease) |
