After three quarters of falling same-store sales, Brian Niccol, Starbucks’ new CEO, is making some changes. One of these is limiting the number of highly personalized drink orders.
Customers and baristas have been complaining for years about how these highly customized drinks can slow down the process of getting orders out quickly.
Niccol wants every order to be in the hands of the customer in four minutes or less. To reach this goal, the company wants to make changes easier.
Niccol said on Wednesday that changes that can be made to the Starbucks mobile app will have “commonsense guardrails” added to them to make things easier for both customers and workers.
He also said that the current mobile custom-ordering system for the company is a pain for both clients and baristas.
“For starters, it’s hard for the customer to understand.” Second, we give people reasons to change the way drinks are made, which is probably not the best way to do it.
Furthermore, it makes things more difficult for our partners to make the drink. Niccol said, “So I’d say we have some cleaning up to do.”
The CEO said these changes will make things more consistent and help keep customers from being surprised by price tags when they order highly customized drinks that might cost more than a regular drink.
Starbucks isn’t just changing the drinks on its menu; the food choices are also about to change. Nicolel said that Starbucks will cut some of its food items so that it can focus on quality over range.
“I do think we’ll be much better at food if we do fewer things better,” he said.
Fortune was told by a Starbucks spokesperson that the coffee chain was reducing its menu to stay true to its roots as a coffee business.
“We want to keep giving customers a lot of options.” “We expect throughput, quality, and consistency to improve by focusing on fewer, better products,” the spokesperson said.
Along with the changes to the menu, Starbucks will start selling flavor bars again next year, which are filled with milk and sugar. Because of the COVID-19 outbreak, most Starbucks stores got rid of their condiment bars.
Nicol wants a simple drip coffee to be ready almost as soon as you order it and given to you by the cashier so that orders placed in the store can be filled as quickly as possible.
People can then take their coffee to the bar with extras to add milk and sugar to their liking.
Nichols talked about the condiment bars: “Our customers want it, and our baristas say it would help them serve people faster like they want to,”
