I used to drink in Starbucks every day. I have even made a pilgrimage to the home of Starbucks at Pike Place Market in Seattle! I bought a mug – which the office cleaning lady broke…
I stopped going to Starbucks when Costa built a new facility in Nottingham where I get free wi-fi and don’t get my car dinged in the car park! It was also newer and shinier. And I’m fickle.
But this week there was a story that my old favourite have been found out. They have paid no income tax for the last three years in the UK. This is despite the fact that they had £1.2bn of sales. We all know that the mark-up on their coffee (and that of their competitors) must be fantastic. But Starbucks make a loss in the UK – and so don’t pay tax!
Of course they have done nothing illegal. They make no profit – they pay no tax. That’s how our tax laws work.
They have a market capitalisation of £24.8bn and has a low UK tax rate because of a number of complicated tax-efficient corporate measures. It buys its coffee beans through a firm based in Lausanne in Switzerland – the beans are then sent to Amsterdam to be roasted before they reach the UK. As a result, Starbucks allocates some profits from its UK sales to these Dutch roasting and Swiss trading units.
So, they might be a High Street giant and claim to be ethical – but they pay less tax than me. I struggle with this concept…
They must pay some tax Tim, I am talking Health Tax aka National Insurance, they have to pay employer contributions for their many employees. Didnt know about the Coffee Beans. Maybe Greggs can send their pasties to Amsterdam and have them heated up and come back in super–insulated boxes to avoid that ridiculous pastie tax? Lets be frank we all pay too much tax and successive governments go on creating yet more stealth charges. I have no sympathy or interest in those whinging about not enough tax being collected when so much of our tax collected is being wasted by dreadful wasteful politicians and so much money is being thrown at overseas aid when we still have so many people living in poverty in the UK.
I agree, the tax is one side of the equation; the woeful waste of our money is quite another!