Comment by 1123581321
1 day ago
At Starbucks, I usually just get a cup of black coffee. Often the barista dispenses it as I'm paying, skipping the queue of orders to be made. However, sometimes I get my coffee cup put into the queue. When this happens, starting this year, it seems they'll carry it out to my table. Before that, they'd put it into the queue of orders which could take awhile. It seems partially barista dependent and partially whether they need to rebrew. I've found that asking for "whatever's brewed" doesn't help; they don't want to pick a blend.
Interesting to think about. Local coffee shop baristas are more transparent about what's brewed and enjoy taking the opportunity to recommend a certain roast or origin if I'm not picky. However, their systems fall down when they're unexpectedly busy.
My local cafe that does both coffee and sandwiches (dine-in, to go and catering) is possibly the worst, not taking orders until they feel caught up on the sandwiches. You can end up waiting 10+ minutes just to get a cup of coffee. From a queueing/distribution perspective, they should be taking those orders constantly and letting them pile up so they have more information about what they need to make and they can reduce the mean wait time. On the other hand, their baffling system is charming and the people placing large orders love the attention and spend way more money than I do. :)
The Starbucks locations near me recently replaced their brewed coffee with on-demand coffee machines for each flavor, so I guess we are all destined to wait in the queue for coffee.
If they've pivoted to using those Wawa/7-11-style "latte" dispensers that sound like someone's blowing their nose while keeping the Starbucks pricing, I'm not surprised they're struggling and closing locations.
In our coming cyberpunk future, Starbucks will just be a brand of vending machines known for burnt coffee and LCD screens displaying scantily clad mermaids
Those are Clover machines from a company they acquired like 15 years ago. They're very good and in my opinion a big improvement over their traditional batch brew-and-store coffee. There are more roasts available to order, the coffee is guaranteed to be fresh, and most of the time they still "skip queue" and hand you your coffee at the register.
>replaced their brewed coffee with on-demand coffee machines for each flavor
like, k-cup style?
Ah, that's terrible news!