Starbucks just replaced its CEO after a difficult nine-month tenure – and as a former barista, I can understand why!
I worked at Starbucks as a teenager in 1999. I agree with former long-time CEO Howard Schultz and his recent manifesto. He’s right – the company has lost its way.
Over the past few years, I’ve been baffled every time I look at the Starbucks menu. Weird, newfangled drinks I’ve never heard of. I can’t even predict what they’ll look like served. I love trying new things and a great new drink, but the menu puts me off.
I have a few ideas for new CEO Brian Niccol when he comes over from Chipotle:
- More lavender powder. This was a seasonal item last spring, but I never got a chance to try it as it was always sold out. It was apparently so popular that stores had trouble keeping it in stock. The outgoing CEO had said the lavender flavor was up there with Pumpkin Spice Latte as the best flavor ever. So more of that!
- Reopen the recently closed Starbucks Astor Place location in New York City. The iconic East Village location, right next to NYU and Cooper Union, has been around since 1995 – an institution! Starbucks couldn’t be this close to a flagship store east of Seattle. New Yorkers need it! The first stop in Lower Manhattan when you need to use the bathroom!
- Make ordering wild and crazy drinks easier. TikTok has had a huge impact on people coming up with new ideas for drinks that can be made with custom ingredients. People share these ideas with “recipes” for ordering – usually a complicated mix of syrup and add-ins and foam on top of a regular iced latte, for example. That’s fun! But actually placing those custom orders through the Starbucks app is complicated. I’d love to see a feature with a daily or weekly changing “crazy drink” where all the customizations are done in the app for you. Even better – a way to seamlessly find a weird new drink combination on TikTok and just type it right into the app. Maybe Starbucks could even find a way to use AI for that.
- Make it clearer which non-coffee drinks contain caffeine. I accidentally ordered a fruity soft drink for my child without knowing it contained caffeine. More options for decaffeinated drinks in general!
- Help the old hands like me figure out how to try new things. I usually just stick with plain hot or iced coffee, partly because I get confused by the new options and don’t want to waste everyone’s time. More photos of the drinks, for example. I want to know what a blended lemonade is Look How.
- Forget the boba balls. Boba is fun and great, but it tastes even better at a real boba shop.
- Bring back the espresso brownie. I probably ate 500 of them in 1999. A top-notch treat.
Now, I don’t necessarily believe that all of these ideas will immediately boost Starbucks’ stock price, but hey, I’m just a customer, not the CEO.
