[Starbucks restaurant in New York City. Illustration: Inc; Photo: Getty Images]
If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, right? And don’t you have a million other things to spend your time on?
Only problem: The world doesn’t stand still. Things around you change. And if the way you do things doesn’t keep pace, you can fall behind.
With that, let’s talk about Starbucks, which announced last week that it’s rolling out a series of chain-wide changes to how its baristas will do business.
Called the Siren Craft System, Starbucks says it’s the result of suggestions from some of its employees (Starbucks calls them “partners”), and it involves changes big and small, intended to tackle a couple of modern problems.
The goals:
- Reduce order wait times.
- Meet demand more easily during the busiest times.
- Teach baristas to use “simplified, more intuitive steps” to create orders.
There are quite a few examples of change in the system, but one jumped out at me as an illustrative example — a small adjustment, basically changing the order in which baristas add ingredients to drinks.
But you can also imagine how it might have big effects if rolled out at more than 17,000 Starbucks in the U.S. and Canada. As Starbucks explained in its official announcement:
One of the key modifications partners helped to develop was a change in what we call “beverage sequencing” — wherein milk is steamed before espresso shots are pulled.
Through in-store trials, partners realized they could save time without sacrificing quality or taste by reversing the process and pulling the espresso before steaming milk.
So simple, right? Espresso first, milk second.
There are bigger changes, one of which involves the creation of a position called the “peak play caller,” which Starbucks says is an “updated role” in its process. The person in this job is supposed to use Starbucks’s software to help figure out where bottlenecks are likely to happen before they do and find ways to help.
Now, let’s go back to our original thesis: the notion that it’s hard to fix things if the problems aren’t obvious.
In the case of Starbucks, the problems it needs to fix are, in fact, obvious. And that means it’s probably true that it waited too long.
It was just about two months ago that Starbucks had to report to investors that its same-store sales were down 3 percent, the first decline since 2020 (which means comparing 2024 to the first big year of the pandemic).
“Let me be clear from the beginning,” CEO Laxman Narasimhan said on the earnings call at the time. “Our performance this quarter was disappointing.”
One issue Starbucks reported: Starbucks Rewards members who use the app to order drinks but then decide, at least “mid-teens percent” of the time, to abandon their orders, Narasimhan said.
The main reasons these customers cited, Narasimhan said, were “long wait times and product unavailability.”
It makes sense for Starbucks then to roll these changes out with a big announcement now — even though it has apparently been working on them since last year and has even piloted the proposals in 1,160 U.S. stores as of the end of May.
The change will come to all Starbucks stores in the U.S. and Canada by the end of this month, Starbucks says.
Now, there’s a good reason to watch this story, even if you don’t think it applies specifically to your business — and for that matter, even if you don’t drink much coffee.
It’s that we’ve seen what I think is a welcome trend recently, in which companies faced with strong headwinds have made a point of sharing the ways they’ve tried to improve efficiency and processes.
It makes sense since the alternatives are either to (a) absorb smaller profits, (b) raise consumer prices, or (c) cut back on costs — most often by either laying off workers or deciding to hire fewer than they otherwise would.
None of those options are good for the economy in the long run. So, I’m generally on the lookout for big companies that choose the let’s-try-another-way route.
Will these changes work for Starbucks? I don’t think any of us can predict the future.
But the good thing about change is that, by definition, you can always change again.
And frankly, you probably should.
