In 1983, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild studied flight attendants whose job required them to be, as she put it, "nicer than natural." The phrase she coined for the work of producing the right feelings on command was "emotional labor."
Four decades later, such emotional labor has evolved. Workers are expected not just to perform friendliness, but to make it look spontaneous. Starbucks $SBUX' Green Apron Service model directs baristas to write a personal message on a customer's cup, and if it is not sufficiently nice, discipline could follow.
What Hochschild identified was not simply the experience of having a hard day at work or managing a household chore list. It was something more precise — and more corrosive.
What emotional labor actually is
Hochschild defined emotional labor as "the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display" that is "sold for a wage." In her book "The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling," Delta Air Lines flight attendants and bill collectors told her about the ways their employers extracted emotional, physical, and cognitive work. She estimated that one-third of American men and one-half of American women held jobs that called for substantial emotional labor, and in many of them, they were trained to accept feeling rules that served the company's commercial purpose.
Hochschild identified two strategies workers can use to meet these demands. Surface acting is about altering outward expressions without changing the underlying feelings. Think of an employee forcing a smile during a bad shift. Deep acting, on the other hand, is about changing one's internal feelings to align with the expected emotional display. Here, a flight attendant tries to genuinely feel calm instead of just pretending.
The distinction between the two has consequences. A 2011 meta-analysis by Ute Hülsheger and Anna Schewe, published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology and drawing on 494 correlations from 95 studies, found substantial relationships between surface acting and impaired well-being. A more recent meta-analysis published in Acta Psychologica in 2025 sharpened the picture: Surface acting correlated with depression and anxiety, while deep acting had no significant correlation with overall negative mental health outcomes.
In other words, pretending to feel something you do not is measurably worse for workers than trying to feel it. This is the scientific backdrop against which Starbucks built its service model.
Where Starbucks goes further
Traditional emotional labor asks a worker to smile. Starbucks' Green Apron Service, rolled out nationally in August 2025, asks something more layered. According to CX Dive, the program's operating standards include five key customer service moments: warmly greeting customers, offering glassware or a mug, crafting beverages with a message on the cup, making connections during handoff, and keeping cafes welcoming and clean.
The cup-writing requirement has drawn particular scrutiny. Several supervisors have said that writing on the cup is part of the "Five Key Moments" and that baristas can be disciplined or let go for missing any of these steps, according to The Takeout. A 2025 Business Insider investigation found that "a serious infraction of the rules, like a profane message or repeatedly forgetting to mark a customer's cup, can lead to termination."
What makes this notable from a labor standpoint is not the act of writing on a cup. It is the demand that the act appear authentic. "Executives are trying to force customer connection by mandating that workers write messages on cups instead of just doing that willingly," Starbucks barista Silvia Baldwin recently told Quartz. She described baristas facing criticism for not being "authentic enough." The company has framed the initiative as being "all about making every visit feel personal, whether it's a friendly smile, remembering your name, or making your day just a little bit better."
In Hochschild's framework, this is a demand for deep acting on an assembly line. The company does not merely want baristas to comply with a display rule. It wants them to internalize it, to mean what they write, and to do so hundreds of times per shift.
Starbucks told Quartz that its Green Apron service is "a flexible operating model focused on craft, connection, and consistency."
"Starbucks has invested approximately $500 million in additional labor to support this model and ensure the right staffing at peak," the company said. It said the work is "supported by ongoing investments in staffing, scheduling, technology, and leadership to improve consistency and customer experience in coffeehouses."
"This is part of a broader test-and-learn model," Starbucks said. "We introduce ideas, listen closely to partner feedback, and make changes to deliver a better, more consistent experience."
The paradox of mandated sincerity
Hochschild warned that an emotional laborer "can become estranged not only from her own expressions of feeling (her smile is not 'her' smile), but also from what she actually feels," and that this estrangement, while a defense against stress, is "also an important occupational hazard."
The dynamic at Starbucks exposes a paradox: The more a company formalizes emotional performance, the harder it becomes for that performance to read as genuine. Customers have noticed. One Starbucks customer on Reddit $RDDT wrote: "It used to feel special the occasional times I'd get a note. Now it's just a reminder I'm making someone do extra work for no reason."
In a 2018 interview with The Atlantic, Hochschild herself noted "a certain 'blurriness' and 'overextension'" in how her concept was being used, expressing concern that the term was drifting from its original meaning about paid work into a catch-all for any unpleasant task. While popular conversation has diluted the term, the corporate world has intensified the practice. At Starbucks, emotional labor is being operationalized, monitored, and enforced.
Starbucks CFO Cathy Smith said on the company's July 2025 earnings call that Starbucks planned to invest more than $500 million in labor hours across company-owned cafes in the next year, starting with the Green Apron Service rollout, according to CNBC. That investment signals that the company views manufactured warmth as central to its business strategy.
Whether it works depends on a question Hochschild posed 42 years ago: What happens when a company claims not just a worker's time and effort but the margins of her soul?