Starbucks aficionados love their Iced Blonde Vanilla Lattes and their Caramel Macchiatos, among other favored beverages. The problem is, they just don’t like waiting for them to hit the counter or drive-thru window.
While there are no hard and fast numbers on how long it takes to complete a Starbucks order, the company’s own data suggests 3-to-5 minutes while a QSR study pins the wait time down to 4 minutes and 44 seconds. The data analytics firm Technomic estimates one-third of Starbucks customers are waiting about five minutes for their orders to be fulfilled.
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It’s not just Starbucks. Mcdonald's and Chick-fil-A wait times clocked in at well over five minutes for wait times in 2022, according to QSR.
But Starbucks seems to be rubbing consumers the wrong way on service wait times and it’s planning on significantly curbing those wait times.
The problem could amount to the size and scope of the Starbucks menu, which comprises approximately 383 billion various concoctions – and that’s just for lattes, Bloomberg reported.
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As part of 2022’s company’s “Reinvention Plan” that’s designed to spur company growth, Starbucks expects its global store portfolio to rise by 7% annually from 2023 to 2025, and addressing perceived longer wait times seems to be a key cog in that plan.
Job one for Starbucks is to admit that it has a shoe-shuffling customer wait problem and it’s doing so.
The company’s chief marketing officer Brady Brewer said in 2022 that he asked his children to simplify their Starbucks drink orders because he “felt bad for the person” tasked with making the drinks.
Company staffers know there's a wait problem.
In July, a Starbucks barista told her TikTok audience to expect longer waits, especially in the afternoon, as staff has thinned out by that time after the morning rush. “It’s just me and another barista,” said Syd, the barista who produced the video. When Starbucks is “super-packed” with walk-in and drive-through customers, something has to give and it’s usually “wait times.”
Starbucks plans on addressing longer wait times with a new service platform called the “Siren System” which places the tools and ingredients to make most store drinks in closer proximity to staffers. Former CEO Howard Schulz had already set a plan in place to hire more baristas to keep the drinks flowing and to cut wait times so more store staff could better engage with customers.
Time will tell how Starbucks fares with its new service wait time initiatives. In the meantime, don’t expect that Pumpkin Spice Latte to land in your hands in record time.
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