Starbucks Huge Two-Drink Mistake

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Sep 30, 6:58AM EDT · Published Sep 29, 7:01AM EDT

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Starbucks Huge Two-Drink Mistake — © Mall Starbucks (CC BY-SA 4.0) by Mr.u3061u3085u3089u3055u3093

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The new Starbucks Corp. (NASDAQ: SBUX | SBUX Price Prediction) promotion is complicated and confusing.
Customers deserve better than that.
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Starbucks Corp. (NASDAQ: SBUX) offers a two-drinks-for-$10 and four-drinks-for-$20 promotion. The fine print is confusing—it even has an asterisk—but the rules to get the offer read like a lawyer has written them. The offer is good on certain days. It has to be a “medium-sized” drink. People get one coupon per membership—no canned beverages. There is no delivery. The offer is at participating stores.

Dear Mr. Brian Niccol (the new CEO, who has free plane rides to the headquarters), If you want people to come back to your too-busy, too-loud stores with slow service, let them have two drinks for the price of one—period.

Niccol may have been a good CEO at Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. (NYSE: CMG). So far, he has issued a manifesto about running Starbucks stores and says he will travel to get to know the business better. He wants to bring Starbucks service back and treat customers better. The CEO before him, Laxman Narasimhan, traveled to stores and worked as a barista. See where it got him. He was fired after a short tenure.

Starbucks needs real benefits to attract customers. Many people who did not like the problem-plagued stores will not return. They have decided to visit local coffee shops or competitors like Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonald’s Corp. (NYSE: MCD).

To return to Starbucks, people need real incentives that do not have asterisks and lines of fine print. What happened to the CEO who built Chipotle?

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.