Starbucks Is Awful

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jun 28, 6:50AM EDT

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Customer service at Starbucks Corp. (NASDAQ: SBUX | SBUX Price Prediction) has worsened since the start of the year.
The company has to “get back to focusing on fundamental operations and executing better” admits the CEO.

“There is more work to do to tailor our stores on the demand that we see, advance our technology, enhance how we innovate our equipment and also more fundamentally, how we get back to focusing on fundamental operations and executing better,” said Laxman Narasimhan, Starbucks Corp. (NASDAQ: SBUX) CEO, on an earnings call.

“40 Minutes for Starbucks Coffee? Customers and Workers Fume Over Fewer Staff” says a Bloomberg headline.

I’ve been going to Starbucks for each of the last four decades. When a store was exceptionally crowded, I waited as much as 15 minutes, but customer service has cratered since the start of the year. In other words, it’s gotten much worse.

Recently, at a Starbucks with five staff members and three customers, I waited 17 minutes for a simple Venti Flat White, which usually takes a minute to make. The staff spent most of the time talking to one another. The other two customers at the store waited over 10 minutes as well. Each had a simple order.

The immediacy of serving customers was gone in a store like the one I visited. This is something that can be part of training and staff discipline. People are not born with it as a special ability for excellent customer service.

Starbucks CEO Narasimhan might say that this is an isolated incident. However, isolated incidents often indicate when a company is struggling.

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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.