How Does Starbucks Make Money, and Where Does Each Dollar Go?

When you buy a drink at Starbucks, most of your money never touches the coffee. Here's where each dollar Starbucks took in went in its last full fiscal year. About thirty-one cents paid for everything that goes into your order and gets it to the store — the coffee, the milk, the food, the cup. About forty-six cents paid to run the store itself: the baristas, the rent, the electricity. About fifteen cents went to everything else, from corporate offices to closing stores. And Starbucks kept about eight cents as operating profit. It was a bad year. Profits fell by half. And all the while, Starbucks was holding money that customers had loaded onto cards and its app — before they'd ordered a thing. So what are you really paying for when you buy a latte? How did the biggest coffeehouse chain in the world lose its way — and what is it doing to win you back? Let's follow the money.

Starbucks didn't start out selling drinks. The first store opened in nineteen seventy-one, near Seattle's Pike Place Market. For a decade, it sold coffee beans, tea and spices — brewed coffee was just a free sample. In nineteen eighty-two, it hired a marketing director from New York named Howard Schultz. The next year, on a trip to Italy, he had his first latte, in a culture where the coffee bar itself was the product: the ritual, the barista, the place. The owners weren't convinced. So in nineteen eighty-six, Schultz left to open his own espresso bars. Then, in nineteen eighty-seven, Starbucks itself came up for sale, and Schultz and a group of investors raised three point eight million dollars to buy it. Within five years, it was opening more than fifty stores a year. That's the business you see today. Not a coffee seller, but a place that sells you time in a room, with coffee attached. Starbucks now has more than forty-one thousand stores around the world and about three hundred eighty-one thousand employees. And its leaders still describe the goal the same way: to be the "third place" — somewhere between home and work.

Here's the money. In fiscal twenty twenty-five, Starbucks brought in about thirty-seven point two billion dollars. Eighty-three percent of it came from the stores Starbucks runs itself. And inside those stores, about seventy-three percent of sales were drinks, and twenty-three percent were food. Now follow a dollar. About thirty-one cents went to what Starbucks calls product and distribution costs: coffee, milk, syrups, food, cups and the trucks that bring them. About forty-six cents went to store operating expenses — mostly the people behind the counter and the buildings themselves. Almost all of its company-operated stores are leased. Roughly fifteen cents covered everything else: depreciation, the corporate offices, and the cost of closing stores. What was left — about eight cents — was operating profit. Leave out the one-time restructuring costs, and it was closer to ten cents. A year earlier, it had been fifteen. And the split hasn't changed much since: in the quarter that ended in June twenty twenty-six, it was about thirty cents for product and distribution, and forty-five cents for the stores. So the coffee isn't the expensive part of your drink. The expensive part is the room you're standing in, and the person making it.

That doesn't mean the beans are cheap. In February twenty twenty-five, arabica coffee futures hit an all-time high of more than four dollars and forty cents a pound. They've since fallen to under three dollars this month — roughly a quarter lower than a year ago. Starbucks doesn't publish what the beans in one cup cost. It hedges its coffee with futures and other contracts, and says its purchases already cover its needs through fiscal twenty twenty-six. And lately, it has kept price increases small. In its most recent quarter in North America, higher prices added less than one percentage point to the average check. It even cut one price. In November twenty twenty-four, Starbucks dropped the extra charge for non-dairy milk in the U.S. and Canada. It said almost half of the customers who paid to customize their drinks would see a price cut of more than ten percent. Because for Starbucks, the bigger risk was never the price of coffee. It was customers who stopped coming in.

And for a while, they did. Sales at stores open at least a year fell for six quarters in a row. For fiscal twenty twenty-five as a whole, they fell two percent in North America, its biggest market. In September twenty twenty-four, Starbucks hired a new chief executive, Brian Niccol, who had run Chipotle. He said the menu had become "overly complex." His plan, called "Back to Starbucks," cost money before it made any. Store operating expenses rose almost twelve percent in fiscal twenty twenty-five, and the company committed more than five hundred million dollars to extra labor hours in its cafés. It cut about eleven hundred corporate jobs early in the year. Then it announced a one-billion-dollar restructuring, with nine hundred more corporate jobs gone, and closed six hundred twenty-seven of its own stores in a single quarter. The result: operating income fell forty-six percent, and net earnings fell by half, to about one point nine billion dollars. For a company built on selling an experience, the experience had become the problem — and fixing it was expensive.

Then came the fixes. Starbucks set out to cut its menu by roughly thirty percent. It set a target of handing over a drink within four minutes in the café — and by this spring, it said about eighty percent of its stores were hitting its speed targets. It made the café a place you pay to be in again: since January twenty twenty-five, a code of conduct in its North American stores says you need to buy something to stay or to use the restroom. And it has refreshed more than a thousand cafés, spending about a hundred fifty thousand dollars on each, with at least fifteen hundred planned by the end of the fiscal year. It's starting to work. In the quarter that ended in June twenty twenty-six, sales at stores open at least a year rose almost eight percent worldwide. The number of transactions rose more than four percent — more visits, not just bigger bills. The adjusted operating margin climbed to fourteen point four percent, and the company raised its forecast for the year. Niccol put it this way: "We have more work to do, but we're relentlessly focused on reclaiming the third place."

There's another way Starbucks makes money from you — before you buy anything. At the end of June, Starbucks had thirty-five point eight million active Rewards members in the U.S. Members can load money into the app before they order. Starbucks doesn't count that money as revenue until you spend it. Until then, it sits on the balance sheet. At the end of fiscal twenty twenty-five, the line for stored-value cards and current deferred revenue came to about one point eight billion dollars. That includes money customers had loaded onto cards and the app but hadn't spent yet. For Starbucks, it's cash in hand that it doesn't pay any interest on. In March twenty twenty-six, the company rebuilt the program around tiers. Its most popular new reward — sixty points for two dollars off any item — now accounts for about a third of all redemptions. Niccol had called the old program "a coupon book." The new one is built to bring you back more often — and Starbucks says a growing number of members now visit four or more times a week.

Not every Starbucks is run by Starbucks. About two-thirds of its stores worldwide are licensed — inside airports, grocery stores and other businesses, or run by partners abroad. Starbucks earns from them by selling them coffee and charging fees, without paying their rent or their staff. In fiscal twenty twenty-five, licensed stores brought in about four point four billion dollars — roughly twelve percent of revenue, from stores Starbucks doesn't have to run. In twenty eighteen, Nestlé paid Starbucks seven point one five billion dollars for the permanent right to sell Starbucks packaged coffee around the world. Sales through partners like Nestlé now make up about five percent of Starbucks' revenue. And this March, Starbucks sold sixty percent of its business in China to the investment firm Boyu Capital, in a deal that valued it at about four billion dollars. Starbucks kept a forty percent stake. Almost eight thousand Chinese stores became licensed stores overnight. Today, about ninety percent of Starbucks' international stores are licensed. Slowly, the company is becoming something closer to a brand owner — and leaving more of the rent, the wages and the risk to someone else.

So who's paying for that profit? You are — but mostly, you're paying for the room, the staff and the speed. If you want the coffee and not the café, brewing at home usually costs a fraction of the price. If you go often, the Rewards program can be worth it — but only if you actually redeem what you earn. Watch the add-ons, too: extra shots, syrups and toppings are where a simple drink quietly becomes an expensive one. Think twice before loading a big balance into the app. Until you spend it, that money works for Starbucks, not for you. And customizing doesn't have to cost extra: non-dairy milk is free at company-run stores in the U.S. and Canada. Then remember who else is paying for the turnaround: shareholders who watched profits fall by half, and employees whose jobs and hours are being redesigned store by store. A latte isn't really a cup of coffee. It's rent, wages and four minutes of someone's time — with a little coffee on top.

Next time on Margin, we follow the money into a bill that goes up almost every year — and that almost nobody reads line by line. If you want to understand how money actually moves before the headlines catch up, subscribe — and follow the money.