The real reason Starbucks is bringing back self-serve milk and sugar

New York (CNN) — Starbucks baristas can put eight shots of espresso into one cup. They can make drinks that taste like strawberries, apple pie, pumpkin spice or, separately, pumpkin cream. But they can’t get Amanda Poore’s coffee order right.

“I usually like about a half-ounce of creamer or less. That can be kind of difficult to communicate to the baristas,” she said. “There are several Starbucks I straight up don’t go to because they put in way too much creamer.”

For years, Poore made her decaf iced espresso just the way she liked it, with no issues at all, at Starbucks in Seattle. Starbucks’ self-serve stations had milk, sugar, sweeteners, spices and stirrers, just like at other coffee shops. But the company locked away the milk and sugars early in the Covid-19 pandemic over fears that the virus could spread on surfaces, and never added them back. Starbucks had also struggled with milk waste at the stations and theft in some cases, according to workers.

Instead, Starbucks left the task of splashing the perfect amount of milk, sugar and other add-ons to overstretched baristas racing to prepare the sort of elaborate drinks that the company has become known for – and that have become viral on TikTok – for several customers at once.

But Starbucks will bring back self-serve stations in all of its stores by early next year, a relief for customers like Poore.

“Now I don’t have to worry about bothering the baristas if they put too much in,” she said.

The return of milk and sugar stations is a small step for Starbucks, but it represents something much bigger for the world’s largest coffee chain. It’s an acknowledgment that Starbucks went too far in overloading its baristas with endless ways to prepare drinks. Bloomberg estimated that there are more than 383 billion possibilities at Starbucks to make just a latte.

“When Starbucks closed condiment bars during Covid, the customization work shifted to the baristas behind the counter,” said David Garfield, the global head of industries at consulting firm AlixPartners. “This caused delays.”

Starbucks will now push some of that work back on to customers. At the same time, it’s cutting menu items to simplify operations for employees and working to improve staffing levels, especially during peak times.

“Our goal is to ensure that our baristas have time to provide not only great craft drinks, but also hospitality” and a personal touch of handing off drinks to customers, a Starbucks spokesperson said.

New strategy

It’s all part of new CEO Brian Niccol’s plan to fix the chain.

The company will also bring back baristas hand-writing customers’ names on their drinks and comfortable seats in an effort to make Starbucks feel more like a coffee shop again.

Starbucks’ sales have slipped for three straight quarters, its longest decline in years. Some customers have stopped going to Starbucks because of high prices for drinks and long wait times, and hundreds of its stores have voted to unionize in protest of pay, benefits and working conditions. More than 30% of Starbucks’ orders now come from customers ordering off their phones and picking them up. This influx of mobile orders has sometimes strained Starbucks workers during rush hours.

Niccol said bringing back self-serve stations will help Starbucks serve drinks in four minutes or less.

“We’re going to bring back the coffee condiment bar because both our customers are asking for it and our baristas are saying it would help them deliver the speed of service that they want to provide,” he said.

A long road to go

But workers say a condiment bar won’t make up for larger issues.

“Having the condiment bar takes a little bit off our plate, but it’s not the bulk of the work,” said Amanda Rivera, a Starbucks worker in Atlanta and a leader of Starbucks Workers United, a worker group that has unionized more than 500 Starbucks stores around the country. Sometimes Rivera is only one of two people working in her store. “A condiment bar is not going to take the place of having proper staffing,” she said.

And the return of self-serve counters could create other work for employees, such as cleaning up spills at the stations and refilling carafes with milk, she said.

“We’ll need to have proper staffing so that people are able to restock the condiment bar and make sure it’s clean and presentable.”

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