Starbucks Is In Trouble. Can We Blame It On Those Picky Customers Who Hold Up The Line?

Source: Visit website

If you want to exchange pleasantries with the person taking the order, fine. But the order itself should be concise. We are not buying a new car or adopting a pet or signing up for flying lessons. We are requesting a coffee — or maybe an iced tea — and that does not need to be complicated.

Unfortunately, some Starbucks customers never got that message, which explains why you might get stuck behind someone who orders something like this: venti, half-whole milk, one quarter 1%, one quarter non-fat, extra hot, no-foam latte with whip, two packets of sugar, one and a half pumps of vanilla syrup and three and a half sprinkles of cinnamon.

Starbucks not only puts up with these bizarre orders, it encourages them: "With more than 170,000 ways to customize beverages at Starbucks® stores, customers can create a favorite drink that fits their lifestyle," it says in a fact sheet dated 2020. Since then, that figure has probably doubled.

After decades spent coddling its customers, Starbucks now faces a reckoning. For months, business writers have been talking about its tanking stock prices , declining revenue and diminishing market share.

Niccol, whose background is in the fast-food industry, has a reputation as a "fixer"; he's credited with rescuing Chipotle Mexican Grill after multiple cases of food-borne illness were traced to the restaurant chain, resulting in a whopping $25 million federal fine .

Experts have offered several explanations: competition from small, independent coffee shops; fast-food chains like McDonald's adding specialty coffees to their menus; inflation that's making consumers less likely to shell out $5 or $6 for a fancy cup of coffee; displeasure over the way Starbucks has been dealing with fed-up employees seeking to unionize .

That might not be a problem if there were enough employees to keep up, but apparently, there are not.

"Menus have gotten much longer, crowded with items that are more complicated and time-consuming to assemble. At the same time, employees say that staffing has dwindled," journalist Amanda Mull writes on Bloomberg .