Third Player in Two Player Game: The Public’s Role in Ithaca Starbucks Shutdown
Starbucks in Ithaca has been operating on reduced hours for almost six months. Collegetown Starbucks was shut down in April due to an unfixed grease trap, and the other store at Ithaca Commons has been closing every day at 2 PM. It is not only frustrating to customers who want to have some authentic Iced Matcha (no offense to those sold in university cafes), but also an enormous obstacle for people working in the stores. With the new operation schedule, workers feel they are being treated unfairly, and their wage is less than before. According to the workers, the store shut down and the reduced hour operation are Starbucks’ retaliation against their unionization strike in April, where workers from the Collegetown Starbucks publicly demanded a cleaner and safer workplace. We can predict what Starbucks is going to do by modeling the situation with Game Theory.
Player 1= workers (strategy in rows), Player 2 = Starbucks (strategy in columns); W = winning in the strike, L = losing in the strike; both parties want to maximize their benefits by winning:
| Accept | Reject | |
| Strike | W, L | L, W |
| No Strike | W, L | L, W |
As shown by the underlines, Starbucks is the sole player that has a Dominant Strategy – as long as it chooses Reject, Starbucks will always win no matter whether workers choose to strike or not. As predicted, Starbucks did not improve the working conditions of the store in Collegetown. Instead, it fired one of the union organizers working at Collegetown Starbucks and shut down the store in June.
Interestingly, the story doesn’t end here. In reality, the strike continues, thereby drawing attention from the media and the public, which is represented by X in the game model:
| Accept | Reject | |
| Strike | W, L | L, W-X |
| No Strike | W, L | L, W |
As shown in the table above, the strike doesn’t affect how workers choose because their payoff is the same- they either win in the strike or lose with no change in their working environment. On the other hand, Starbucks’ payoff can be severely affected by variable X: if X is so large that W-X < L, “Reject” will no longer be the Dominant Strategy. Instead, it is replaced by Nash Equilibrium (Strike, Accept), as shown with underlines:
| Accept | Reject | |
| Strike | W, L | L, W-X |
| No Strike | W, L | L, W |
To conclude, it’s fascinating how X acted as a third player in the two-player game, who helped Player 1 and Player 2 reach Nash Equilibrium. When Game Theory is applied to real societal issues, terminologies like Dominant Strategy and Nash Equilibrium had significant meanings for workers’ lives. More importantly, the model shows that increasing social awareness (X) can have a really significant impact on achieving social equality, like helping reopen Collegetown Starbucks.