You’re already in line at Starbucks — having failed to order by app — when you spot one of them. That dude who is looking down not at a cellphone but at the Post-it note that holds the orders of his office mates. Which is confirming that you are going to be late for that next meeting, because this person plans to order six coffee beverages, each of which involves some combination of tall venti grande double-pump, one to four shots of espresso, half-caf, oat milk, nonfat milk, soy milk, milk milk, whipped cream, syrup, brown sugar, white sugar, no sugar and mocha drizzle, from the pike position with two and a half twists.
Even ordering via app has issues. There’s often a crowd waiting at the bar end because Gen Z, which tends to prefer anything but human interface, has overwhelmed the baristas with the same orders-of-magnitude drinks. Starbucks says there are more than 170,000 possible drink combinations available, but outside estimates have put the number at more than 300 billion. And the person in front of you always seems to be ordering 100 million of them.
If the degree of difficulty in a typical Starbucks order now seems to be Olympian, so are its troubles. The Seattle-based company has become the Boeing of coffee bars. So much so that, like the airframe maker, Starbucks has jettisoned its chief executive, Laxman Narasimhan, and replaced him with Brian Niccol, who until recently was the C.E.O. of the Chipotle Tex-Mexish food chain. Although Mr. Niccol’s appointment drove up Starbucks’s stock price, the two companies sometimes have the same problem: too many choices and not enough staff, which at peak times is almost certain to deliver disappointment as much as it does burritos or lattes.
Starbucks and every other publicly traded food and beverage franchise face the same issue: They have a roughly 1,500- to 3,000-square-foot store envelope, and they have to figure out the optimal throughput that can provide the annual sales growth that will keep Wall Street investors sated. And they are never sated.
The answer is always: Add more stuff, which creates ever more complexity, from supply chain to food safety to packaging to scheduling and delivery. Consider outfits like Pizza Hut that once sold only … pizza. Their calculation today is that they’ve got one pizza oven in each store, and they have to keep it hot through the day anyway, so they ask: What else can we run through this thing, and profitably? And oh, it has to be simple enough for teenagers to operate. That’s why pizzerias are now selling flatbreads, chocolate chip cookies, brownies and Cinnabon mini-rolls — anything that can be baked. Because you always want a Cinnabon after you’ve consumed three slices of pepperoni pizza.
Starbucks has to deal with both a complexity issue and a culture issue. Since the company went public in 1992 at $17 a share, Wall Street pressure meant adding more stores, more snacks and sandwiches and more equipment such as an oven for breakfast items and pastries. Drink variations began to expand well beyond plain coffee — hello, pistachio crème Frappuccino. The company would even add alcohol to its upscale cafes to address the evenings — a time of day that was always weak.