Starbucks is being asked to come up with ways to reduce wait times.
There’s nothing worse than having a barista waiting during the morning rush, and with Starbucks’ sales set to fall in 2024, experts are urging the coffee giant to speed up the process to boost customer loyalty.
The coffee roasting company reported its steepest profit drop in years last quarter as it faced boycotts and inflation.
The Seattle-based bean seller has been fighting back in recent months with BOGO sales and great value bundle deals.
However, industry experts reveal that it is not just the high price of the products that is putting off consumers, but also the extremely long waiting times.
“There are complaints about wait times, quality of service and cafe ambience – for many, Starbucks just doesn’t feel as special as it once did,” said Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData. Daily MailHe added that chains are “right to try to offer more value” to retain customers.
But he said lowering prices was “essentially an attempt to hide cracks” and suggested increasing wait times were the root cause of the loss of customer base.
The data shows that some caffeine addicts are waiting up to 40 minutes for their morning latte because staffing cuts mean baristas can’t get orders done in a timely manner.
“Today, some customers who come into our stores or use mobile order and pay are unable to complete their transaction because of wait times,” Starbucks CEO Lakshman Narasimhan told the Daily Mail earlier this year.
The company has previously denied it was understaffed, and Narasimhan said the company sees an “opportunity” to improve the speed of service, without elaborating on whether it has specific plans to address the issue.
Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz recently published a lengthy LinkedIn post calling on the coffee chain to rethink its US operations to “focus on the customer experience.”
“One of Starbucks’ first actions should be to reinvent its mobile ordering and payment platform and return it to the uplifting experience it was created to deliver,” he wrote.
