Starbucks Is Awful

24/7 Insights

• Customer service at Starbucks Corp. (NASDAQ: SBUX) has worsened since the start of the year.
• The company has to “get back to focusing on fundamental operations and executing better” admits the CEO.

“There is more work to do to tailor our stores on the demand that we see, advance our technology, enhance how we innovate our equipment and also more fundamentally, how we get back to focusing on fundamental operations and executing better,” said Laxman Narasimhan, Starbucks Corp. (NASDAQ: SBUX) CEO, on an earnings call.

“40 Minutes for Starbucks Coffee? Customers and Workers Fume Over Fewer Staff” says a Bloomberg headline.

I’ve been going to Starbucks for each of the last four decades. When a store was exceptionally crowded, I waited as much as 15 minutes, but customer service has cratered since the start of the year. In other words, it’s gotten much worse.

Recently, at a Starbucks with five staff members and three customers, I waited 17 minutes for a simple Venti Flat White, which usually takes a minute to make. The staff spent most of the time talking to one another. The other two customers at the store waited over 10 minutes as well. Each had a simple order.

The immediacy of serving customers was gone in a store like the one I visited. This is something that can be part of training and staff discipline. People are not born with it as a special ability for excellent customer service.

Starbucks CEO Narasimhan might say that this is an isolated incident. However, isolated incidents often indicate when a company is struggling.

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