Companies like Starbucks and The Fresh Market are all-in on emergency savings

A record share of Americans tapped into their 401(k) accounts for emergencies in 2025, according to an analysis of plans managed by Vanguard.

Emergency savings accounts are seen as one potential backstop to this practice. Since 2019, the non-profit Commonwealth has partnered with BlackRock to expand access to emergency savings benefits by piloting them in workplaces across the US.

Even as hardship withdrawals are on the rise, this Emergency Savings Initiative (ESI) has nonetheless helped boost short-term savings, as well as encouraged retirement participation, among workers, a new report shows. Since the program launched, some 22 million Americans have gained access to emergency savings solutions, which have generated an estimated $7.9 billion in savings.

Notably, the report suggests that enrolling in short-term savings can also promote long-term saving for life events such as retirement, Timothy Flacke, co-founder and CEO of Commonwealth, said. The question of whether workers can “have a brighter long-term financial future” can be motivating, but also discouraging if not possible, he said.

“This work around short-term savings, we now know with greater confidence, is intimately connected to that longer term wealth building agenda,” he said. Among the employers participating in the ESI program, 20% began contributing to a 401(k) plan for the first time after opening an emergency savings account.

Starbucks is one such employer, noted Claire Chamberlain, president of the BlackRock Foundation. Hourly workers who participate in the company’s emergency savings program contribute three times as much to their 401(k) plans as non-savers, she noted. This case study, “confirmed the original operating hypothesis, and gave…greater insights as to what kind of a difference it was making.”

The decision to launch an emergency savings program, dubbed My Starbucks Savings, came from employees (called “partners” internally) who requested “more support to better manage their finances,” Jeannie Pae, SVP of global rewards, said via email. “Partners who use the benefit have shared how it has encouraged them and made it easier to save, helping them to be prepared for unexpected expenses when life happens,” she added.

Institutional backing. Buy-in from policymakers and financial institutions has helped emergency savings gain ground among employers, Flacke said. Companies now have the option to link non-highly compensated employees’ retirement plans to an emergency savings account, thanks to a provision in the SECURE 2.0 Act that took effect last year. The law also allows employers to automatically enroll employees in pension-linked emergency savings accounts.

Additionally, financial institutions like T. Rowe Price and Voya have added emergency savings accounts to their suite of offerings for already-existing clients, Flacke said. With this approach, “something that sounds good in the abstract now becomes actionable because it’s coming from a trusted vendor that you already have a relationship with, and have confidence has dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s.”

The Fresh Market, a grocery store chain with locations in 22 different states, drew on existing partnerships with SoFi and Truist when it launched emergency savings pilot programs about four years ago, Paula Stop, director of total rewards, told HR Brew. The programs are going well enough that The Fresh Market is in the process of expanding them to workers in additional locations.

Stop said she was particularly glad to hear from workers whose financial situation meaningfully changed as a result of the benefits. One employee, for example, was able to draw from her emergency savings account after her car was vandalized to fix a shattered back window. Other workers became more confident about building savings after they received help managing a high-interest credit card, or refinancing a car loan.

“There just isn’t a lot of wiggle in their budgets, because their budgets are so tight,” Stop explained, adding that The Fresh Market employs a large share of low-to-moderate income workers. She said that her company hadn’t gotten specific feedback on whether access to an emergency savings plan made employees more comfortable contributing to a 401(k) account, but added that it was an issue they were starting to explore.

While employers can offer financial incentives to workers who participate in emergency savings programs, the benefit doesn’t have to come at a high cost to the business, Stop noted. “If you’re in retail and you have a thin budget, you can make it happen and it doesn’t have to be hard,” she said.