Starbucks vs. the grind

Long lines. Plunging sales. Pissed-off employees. Can the world’s largest chain of coffeehouses make coffee fun again?

You know that shaky, nauseated feeling you get when you’ve had too much coffee? That’s how Starbucks itself is feeling these days. At peak hours, its ubiquitous cafés are overcrowded and slow. Garbled names written in Sharpie have been replaced by computer-printed stickers for online-ordering overachievers, who are allowed to jump the line. Employees — once among the happiest in America — are unionizing. There’s new competition from Dutch Bros and boba tea. The company reported yesterday that US sales have dipped for the last two quarters, down 2% since April, and profits are off 7.5%. With more than 33,000 cafés, the world’s largest coffee chain has turned into a total grind.

But now, Starbucks seems to have woken up and smelled the — well, you know. On July 2, the company announced a major revamp of the way its cafés are organized. Called the “Siren Craft System,” it overhauls the workflow at some 10,000 of its coffeehouses in an effort to reduce inefficiency, speed up orders, and boost customer satisfaction. But unlike most plans dreamed up by fancy-pants consultants, Siren Craft doesn’t try to solve the problem by cranking up the assembly line or flogging employees into a state of heightened productivity. Instead, it does something truly novel in American business: It attempts to actually fix what’s wrong with pretty much every company that makes things for lots of people.

Every fast-food outlet, Starbucks cafés included, is a little factory. The order of operations is highly prescribed, a carefully choreographed system of specialization that’s been timed down to the second. For Starbucks, the trick is to balance America’s addiction to cheap and speedy service with the vibe of a European-style coffeeshop — creating a relaxed, enjoyable “third place” for people to hang out beyond their office and home. There’s a reason Starbucks used to sell CDs of the inoffensively groovy music it played in its cafés. People, it understood, need a cozy place to doomscroll.

The Siren Craft System tries to get this recipe right. For starters, it changes the sequence in which baristas make drinks. That’s because over the years, as Starbucks introduced more and more cold beverages — a Frozen Strawberry Açaí Lemonade Refresher, anyone? — it has gotten harder and harder to keep up with all the orders. “The build for the drinks themselves have gotten more complex and has more steps, so they take longer to make,” says Michelle Eisen, a Starbucks barista and union organizer. “The order in which we were asked to build those drinks was no longer working.”

The new system instructs baristas to push cold drinks down in the queue in favor of hot ones. That might seem surprising, given the popularity of the milkshake-like Frappuccino line and the fruity Refreshers. But the fact is, the cold drinks also take longer to make. Order one of each, and you’ll end up holding a melting Frappuccino before they even start on your double espresso. The higher-grossing cold drinks take so long to make, in fact, that they’re actually pretty low-margin. The highest-margin item on the menu, a person familiar with Starbucks operations tells me, is probably a plain old drip coffee.

Siren Craft also switches up the way baristas make coffee. They used to pull espresso shots first and steam milk second. But employees told management that the caffè was getting cold waiting for the latte. The new system reverses that order to get the ingredients into better sync.

Then there’s the digital dashboard that tells baristas what to do next. Starbucks is about to expand who can place orders via its app, and it’s expecting a huge influx. So it’s reprogramming the dashboard to anticipate when a flood of orders is coming and warn supervisors, to help them figure out who needs to be doing what. That might seem like a minor change, but when you’re operating at the scale of Starbucks, all the savings in seconds really add up.

Finally, in perhaps its biggest innovation, the new system is changing the role of each café’s “peak play caller.” During crunch times, these managers will be empowered to deviate from everyone’s set assignments, like a coach calling a play from the sideline. They’ll be able to move employees around, taking someone off the espresso machine, say, and putting them on a register. The idea is to improve efficiency and productivity by giving managers more flexibility to improvise, rather than by throwing more bodies at the problem. Which is a pretty profound departure from the stopwatch-driven, one-size-fits-all approach that corporate America has long applied to the factory floor.

What’s most interesting about Siren Craft, though, is what it isn’t. It’s not a widgetized assembly line that doubles down on barista performance metrics. It doesn’t force every customer to order via the app, or make hand-wavey gestures at AI or some other flashy approach to efficiency and productivity. That kind of thinking is what got the company into so much trouble in the first place — poring over spreadsheets rather than improving coffee pour-overs. Starbucks was always commodified, but it went so far in that direction that it started breaking the brand. From Boeing to Google to Wells Fargo, metrics-driven pushes for efficiency and productivity always jeopardize the quality of the product, alienate employees, and drive away loyal customers.

In a work-from-home world, it’s hard to imagine Starbucks ever having the cachet and daily urgency it once did. Fewer people are looking for a warm drink on the way to the office or a post-lunch pick-me-up — and given rising prices, not many of us have the extra $5 to burn. But it’s not impossible for the company to bounce back. A visit to a Starbucks could still be a semi-regular treat, if people can feel assured that their quick pop-in for a hot cup of joe won’t turn into 25 minutes of queuing behind a bunch of kids eager for a frothy cold sugar blast.

Eisen knows the Siren Call System won’t employ more baristas, as the union would like. But she’s hopeful that it represents a step in the right direction. Long lines, after all, don’t just frustrate customers. They also prevent employees from serving up coffee with a more human touch.

“There used to be an element of fun to being a Starbucks barista,” Eisen says. “It was amazing to have the time to talk to customers and sample new products with them, and get to know what their tastes were. Anything we can do to bring that third-place atmosphere back into the stores would be nice to see.”