- On Tuesday, Starbucks opened its first-ever Starbucks Pickup store, a pickup-only location that lets customers order ahead through the chain's mobile app and pick up their orders in-store.
- I visited the Starbucks Pickup store, which is located in Manhattan, New York, and was impressed by the concept.
- Pickup's speedy, high-tech system for ordering coffee could definitely transform the fast-coffee industry. But Starbucks needs to make the concept more accessible to walk-ins, and the company must work hard to build customer awareness before the Pickup concept will run as smoothly as it's supposed to.
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"I want my coffee now" is probably a phrase as common as "Are we there yet?" and "Let's check on our order to make sure they haven't forgotten us."
In a world where everything from delivery to internet speeds is getting faster, it makes sense that people would want their coffee faster, too. On Tuesday, Starbucks launched a new kind of store to meet that need: Starbucks Pickup.
Starbucks Pickup is a pickup-only store that allows customers to order their drinks ahead through the Starbucks app, then come to the store to pick them up.
"Our customers who are on-the-go have told us that connection and convenience are important to them," Starbucks' vice president of urban markets, Katie Young, said in a press release.
I went to the first-ever Starbucks Pickup store, located in Manhattan, to see what the experience was like: