Starbucks is in trouble. Let’s blame those picky customers who hold up the line | Opinion

Five or six words — that’s all it should take to order one cup of coffee.

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.

(Full disclosure: I’ve never heard someone order anything like that, but I’ve read about it.)

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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.

Is it any wonder, then, that Starbucks is in financial trouble?

Too many choices

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.

Starbucks even brought in a new CEO, Brian Niccol, to turn things around.

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.

In order to fix things, however, Niccol must first figure out what’s wrong.

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.

And then there’s this: Starbucks offers too many choices, which means more work for the staff.

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.

That means longer waits for customers, since even a fairly simple request like asking for an extra shot of espresso in your latte adds around 25 seconds of prep time. All those seconds add up, and as wait times increase, customers become more frustrated — maybe so frustrated that they take their business elsewhere.

‘They always wait on the drive-through first’

Another issue: Starbucks appears to be pitting groups of customers against one another.

I recognize that is almost certainly not the case and may even sound like some kind of weird conspiracy theory, but hear me out.

There are three groups of customers at Starbucks: Those who order online, those who order at the drive-through, and those who actually walk in and order at the cash register.

I am in the third group, which generally works out just fine — except for that one Saturday morning.

I ordered, sat down and settled in, expecting to wait five or six minutes. Maybe 10, tops. But as the minutes ticked by, I watched a succession of online customers waltz in and out with their coffee and their smug expressions of pity for those who lacked the foresight to order in advance.

All the while, the drive-through line got shorter and shorter. The low point came when the white sedan that had joined the car queue as I entered the store LEFT THE PICK-UP WINDOW WHILE I WAS STILL WAITING.

After around 25 minutes that seemed more like 45, I got my grande cappuccino (two words).

The worst part of the experience wasn’t the length of the wait, it was a perception that in the Starbucks hierarchy, I didn’t count. Environmental scofflaws who idled their engines while waiting for their orders were valued more than more ecologically minded walk-in customers.

(Being simultaneously self-righteous and curmudgeonly is my super power.)

And it’s not just me.

Another disgruntled customer confided this: “They always wait on the drive-through first.”

With customers like us, no wonder Starbucks is in trouble.

Good luck, Brian Niccol.