No wonder millions of customers have left Starbucks after complaining about painfully long waits for coffee.
Now the true extent of the service speed collapse has been revealed.
One in twelve customers now waits between 15 and 30 minutes. Before the pandemic, hardly anyone waited that long, according to new figures from industry data experts.
Incredibly, one in fifty orders in the first three months of this year took more than half an hour.
And there’s a very simple reason for all this, we can reveal – and it’s not lazy or slow staff.
That’s because Starbucks bosses, in an effort to cut costs, are cutting staff while simultaneously rolling out an increasingly complicated drinks menu.
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Where a few years ago there were five people making frappucinos, now there are only three or four.
Starbucks employs even fewer people in the US than in 2020, but has since opened another 1,000 locations.
The understaffing is partly attributed to a secret computer program used by the bosses.
The software guesses how many staff are needed for each shift for each store. It looks at the weather, local events, history of busy and quiet times in the past.
Employees and their managers say the company woefully underestimates how long it takes to make drinks.
Each espresso shot lasts 26 seconds, the employees say.
It’s not the only technology upsetting staff. Another is a rather sinister NBA-style shot clock placed near the drive-thru windows. It flashes red if the employee talks to a customer for more than 30 seconds
Starbucks said the clock is for supervisors to see if they should send more employees to the drive-thrus.
A Starbucks regular, Chris Mills, told Bloomberg how he waited 40 minutes for a latte he picked up for his wife on Mother’s Day. He said six baristas were overwhelmed
He said he loves the “friendly little handwritten smiley face and sometimes a note on the cup” at his local cafe in Shelton, Connecticut.
But that day, the consumer products director said, “No one involved, including myself, the other customers and even the staff, seemed to be happy.”
Techomic, a data company, looked at wait times after Starbucks’ own CEO admitted that long wait times were a major reason it was losing customers.
In addition to the above figures, they discovered that the number of people waiting between five and fifteen minutes has also increased: from 20 percent to 31 percent.
Three in five now get their coffee in less than five minutes – which seems fine. But before the pandemic, it was four in five at that time.
Incredibly, one in fifty customers waits more than half an hour. One in a hundred, over an hour.
Starbucks has had a disastrous start to the year, with tens of millions of customers going to competitors instead or staying home.
Starbucks coffee shops have a clock that keeps track of how long staff spend talking to customers
Starbucks baristas say cafes are understaffed
A key factor here – which company CEO Laxman Narasimhan even admits – is the painfully slow service.
In early May, Starbucks reported a shocking drop in sales for the first time in nearly three years — and that was at the height of the pandemic. It wasn’t until November that it reported record revenues.
Several factors are to blame – including high prices, customers cutting back on spending and bad weather – but the slow service was highlighted by Starbucks’ CEO.
Starbucks’ growth is due to complicated and customizable drinks like Frappuccinos in the summer or Pumpkin Spice Lattes in the fall, but they can all take baristas minutes to make.
