It’s no wonder millions of customers have abandoned Starbucks after complaining about long waits for coffee.
Now the true extent of the collapse in service speed has emerged.
One in 12 customers currently waits between 15 and 30 minutes. Before the pandemic, almost no one expected that much, new figures from industry data experts show.
Incredibly, during the first three months of this year, one in 50 orders took more than half an hour.
And we can reveal that there is a very simple reason for all this: and it’s not that the staff are lazy or slow.
That’s because Starbucks bosses, in a bid to cut costs, are cutting staff while implementing an increasingly complicated drinks menu.
Where a few years ago there might have been five people making frappucinos, now there are only three or four.
In fact, Starbucks employs fewer people in the US than in 2020, but has opened 1,000 more stores since then.
The lack of staff is attributed in part to a secret computer program used by bosses.
The software guesses how many staff will be needed for each shift at each store. Analyzes the climate, local events, and history of busy and quiet times past.
Workers and their managers say it woefully underestimates the time it takes to make drinks.
Each shot of espresso lasts 26 seconds, the staff says.
It’s not the only technology that bothers staff. Another is a rather ominous NBA-style shot clock placed near the drive-thru windows. Flashes red if the staff member speaks to a customer for more than 30 seconds.
Starbucks said it’s time for supervisors to see if they need to direct more workers to the drive-thru.
A regular Starbucks customer, Chris Mills, told Bloomberg how he waited 40 minutes for a latte he was buying on Mother’s Day for his wife. He said six baristas were forced to lose control.
He said he loves the “friendly handwritten smiley face and sometimes a note on the cup” at his local coffee shop in Shelton, Connecticut.
But that day, the consumer products executive said: “No one involved, from my observation, not even myself, the other customers and even the staff seemed to be happy.”
Techomic, a data company, analyzed wait times after Starbucks’ CEO himself admitted that long waits were one of the main reasons he was losing customers.
In addition to the above numbers, they found that those waiting between five and 15 minutes also increased: from 20 to 31 percent.
Three in five drink their coffee in less than five minutes, which seems about right. But before the pandemic there were four out of every five attended at that time.
Incredibly, one in 50 customers waits more than half an hour. One in 100 more than an hour.
Starbucks has had a disastrous start to the year, with tens of millions of customers heading to rivals or staying home.
Starbucks coffee shops have a clock that records how long staff talk to customers
Starbucks baristas say cafes are understaffed
A key factor, as even the company’s CEO Laxman Narasimhan acknowledges, is the slow service.
In early May, Starbucks reported a surprising drop in sales for the first time in nearly three years, and that was at the height of the pandemic. Only in November were record revenues recorded.
Multiple factors are to blame, including high prices, customers cutting back on spending and bad weather, but Starbucks’ CEO singled out slow service.
Starbucks’ growth has come thanks to complicated, customizable drinks like Frappuccinos in the summer or pumpkin spice lattes in the fall, but each one can take baristas several minutes to prepare.