Starbucks sets ambitious new goal to combat customers' biggest gripe

Daily Mail​

5 hours ago

Starbucks is making a bold promise to tackle customers' biggest gripe — no coffee will take longer than four minutes.
America's biggest coffee chain has lost millions of customers in the past year, some fed up with high prices or shoddy stores.
But, by Starbucks' own admission, most had grown weary of waiting 20 minutes for a drink.
CEO Brian Niccol, poached from Chipotle in the fall, is rolling out a new 'Green Apron Service' to tackle this and other customers moans. Baristas have a target that no custom drink should take more than four minutes.
The key to cutting wait times is Starbucks' biggest hiring spree in history — which adds as many as 85,000 workers across its 17,000 US locations.
When Niccol's announced the recruitment blitz at a huge Starbucks convention in Las Vegas in June, the 14,000 stores managers roared their approval.
Five years ago, Starbucks stores averaged 23 employees. Cost-cutting has since trimmed that number down to 18 to 19 — four to five fewer workers per location.
'It's centered on putting enough partners on the roster in the stores and then deployed correctly so they can provide that customer connection, that experience, that frankly Starbucks really was founded on,' Niccol said.
Restoring pre-Covid staffing levels would mean hiring between 68,000 and 85,000 people across all US stores.
Even focusing solely on the 11,000 company-owned locations, the increase would still be a massive 44,000 to 55,000 hires.
The new hires are also expected to support Starbucks' efforts to bring back a more personal touch — including a new policy asking baristas to handwrite notes on customers' cups.
The former Chipotle boss has embarked on a series of plans to return Starbucks to its original 'third place between home and work' concept.
Coffee drinkers have turned away from the chain in recent years, put off by high beverage prices, long wait times and impersonal experiences.
Niccol has set about axing complicated drinks from Starbucks menus, asking staff to put messages on customer's coffee cups and scaling back promotions.
The plan will help address the major customer pet peeve of long wait times before getting their hands on a coffee.
It will also likely be popular with front of house employees who have complained of chronic issues with understaffing, which compounds the backlogs.
Another change is Starbucks' decision to axe mobile and pickup-only stores.
All 80-90 locations will either shutter or be converted to traditional coffeehouses by next year.
Other changes include removing complicated drinks and new uniform rules — the latter resulting in baristas threatening to quit.
The changes were not enough to improve Starbucks' sales, which declined for its sixth straight quarter.
Both its global and North American sales dipped by two percent — higher than price drops anticipated by Wall Street.