Starbucks workers get pay bump, new coffee, tattoo leeway

The world's biggest coffee-shop chain is giving the first harvest from Hacienda Alsacia, the Costa Rican farm it bought last year, to its workers, Haley Drage, a spokeswoman for Seattle-based Starbucks, said in an e-mail. The plantation's first year yielded about 300,000 pounds of beans, less than 0.1 percent of the coffee Starbucks purchased in its fiscal 2013, Bloomberg reports. Starbucks bought the 240-hectare (about 600-acre) estate, its first such purchase, to expand its grower-support program and experiment with new disease-resistant coffee varieties. The company, which has about 20,800 locations worldwide, has said it may consider buying other farms. "The first harvest from Hacienda Alsacia is a historic moment for Starbucks, and what better way to celebrate that than by giving it to our partners," said Craig Russell, executive vice president of global coffee. "This coffee represents the opportunity we have to support farmers worldwide with the development of high quality coffee for the entire industry." Bags of the whole-bean coffee were given to Starbucks district managers at a leadership conference in Seattle earlier this week. The Hacienda Alsacia coffee also will be sold in some other Starbucks blends in stores. Starbucks rose 1.2 percent to $73.54 at the close in New York. The shares have slid 6.2 percent this year, compared with a 2.1 percent gain for the Standard & Poor's 500 Index.