Starbucks has lost tens millions of customers this year after coffee drinkers became fed up with waiting 20 minutes for a drink,
The huge sales lump led to the the old boss being sacked – but his replacement is promising to deliver faster coffee in a bid to win customers back.
Brian Niccol, previously the Chipotle boss, has promised that customers will get a brewed coffee in under 30 seconds.
During an interview with ABC’s Good Morning America, the new CEO shared plans to prioritize speed and efficiency, which include creating dedicated mobile order pickup areas.
The CEO mentioned that the aim is to provide customers with a quick and seamless experience, particularly when ordering a brewed cup of coffee and interacting with the barista.
‘My hope is we can get you a brewed cup of coffee in less than 30 seconds.’
Starbucks regular Jasmin Guevara joked: ‘That seems very, very optimistic given the utter chaos there is in most cafes.’
Customers’ biggest gripe – along with high prices – has been ‘ridiculous’ wait times – with 20 minutes common to get a coffee.
Recent data from industry experts reveal that currently, one out of every twelve customers waits between 15 and 30 minutes for their order, a stark contrast to the situation before the pandemic when very few customers experienced such lengthy wait times.
Niccol added that his team is ‘right now’ working on a technology solution that will make mobile order wait times much more accurate.
Chipotle’s CEO Brian Niccol (pictured) promises brewed coffee in 30 seconds
‘Today, you know, we just kind of give you an estimate, ‘Hey, it’ll be ready in three to five minutes,’ he said.
‘In the future, what’ll happen is we’ll be like, ‘Rebecca, your drink will be ready at nine,’ instead of it just being made, sitting on the counter [and] waiting for people to come.’
In the summer, former CEO Laxman Narasimhan admitted that the chain’s infamously slow service – which led to an astonishing one in seven mobile orders being abandoned – was a big factor in sales slumping.
Niccol, who replaced Narasimhan in September, is steering Starbucks through a critical transition. He landed a $100 mullion pay package, and will not be required to relocate from his home in Newport Beach, California, to Seattle, the headquarters of the global café chain.
It is the latest of a series of plans Niccol has to turn things around at Starbucks, which has about 17,000 stores in North America.
The new Starbucks boss had said in October that he will simplify the chain’s ‘overly complex menu’ as another way to speed up the service.
Appointed in September after leading Chipotle for six years, Niccol said the chain needed to ‘fundamentally change’ its strategy.
The company’s last earnings report, for the three months from July to September. revealed that sales had fallen sharply for the third consecutive quarter.
US sales fell 6 percent, as cash-strapped customers are increasingly put off by high prices and long wait times for drinks.
‘Simplifying the menu may help resolve the problem of cafes becoming more stressful and less appealing, but they are not the only issues in play,’ Neil Saunders, Managing Director of GlobalData Retail, told DailyMail.com.
‘The main issue is that consumers are buying less coffee from Starbucks in order to save money,’ he said.
Offering more promotions does not seem to have worked, said Saunders, and the chain announced in early October that it was scaling back on discounts offered through its mobile app.
‘The other issue which compounds the problem is that Starbucks has gone off track in terms of the added value it is supposed to provide,’ he added.
‘Its cafes are too busy, lines too long, and too many of them are not pleasant places to linger. That means some people have defected to rivals, including independent chains.’
CEO Niccol said the company needed to address issues with staffing levels at coffee shops and the pricing of its drinks and food.
The new Starbucks boss has said he will simplify the chain’s ‘overly complex menu’ in a bid to win back customers amid slumping sales
US sales fell 6 percent in the last quarter, as cash-strapped customers are increasingly put off by high prices and long wait times for drinks
‘People love Starbucks, but I’ve heard from some customers that we’ve drifted from our core, that we’ve made it harder to be a customer than it should be, and that we’ve stopped communicating with them,’ he said in a prerecorded video after announcing the latest earnings report.
‘As a result, some are visiting less often, and I think today’s results tell that same story.’
‘Starbucks is still a huge business, but its growth engine has stopped spinning and it will need to review its proposition if it wants to advance, especially in the North American market,’ Saunders added.
It comes as stressed Starbucks workers have complained of chronic issues with understaffing, which leads to backlogs in coffee shops.
According to an internal survey seen by Bloomberg, only 33 percent of workers at the company’s 10,000 US locations say stores consistently have sufficient workers.
‘We are constantly only given a skeleton staff,’ one worker said in comments collected as part of the survey.
