- Starbucks customers often face long lines to get their drinks at the chain's cafés.
- One Starbucks employee in North Carolina said the problem goes back to understaffing.
At a Starbucks cafe in North Carolina, the biggest problem isn't getting complicated customer orders right. It's that there aren't enough employees to serve them.
Aside from two hours in the morning, the store usually just has three people on duty, an employee who works at the location told Business Insider. He asked not to be named in this article, citing fear of retaliation from Starbucks, but BI has verified his identity and work for Starbucks.
That's not nearly enough, given the volume of orders coming in throughout the day, the employee said. The store is located near major roads and shopping centers, he added, meaning that the Starbucks store's dining room is busy throughout the day.
Even more challenging to manage: the orders that customers place online and through the chain's app.
"Mobile orders are a huge problem because you could have 20 people place a mobile order at the same time, and then they all come through at once," the employee said.
The North Carolina Starbucks worker is far from the only one who's noticed the challenges Starbucks faces in filling customers' orders.
Like many national restaurant chains, Starbucks has spent years building its online system and added complimentary logistics for pick-up and delivery orders. But Starbucks customers have reported long wait times — up to 25 minutes — just to get a single drink.
"The whole app ordering process is so seamless and easy until you get to the post-purchase and you see how long it's going to take to fill your order," Sky Canaves, principal analyst for retail and e-commerce at Emarketer, said on a recent Emarketer podcast about Starbucks. "If it's going to take more than five minutes, it's frustrating."
Even Laxman Narasimhan, who stepped down as Starbucks' CEO this month, has said there's a problem. App users, many of whom are members of the chain's rewards program, often "put items into their cart and sometimes chose not to complete their order, citing long wait times or product unavailability," he said on an earnings call in April.
In response, Starbucks has started rolling out a streamlined production process called the Siren Craft System, which reduces the time it takes to make its beverages.
Analysts also expect changes to Starbucks and its restaurants under incoming CEO Brian Niccol, who beefed up Chipotle's online business through innovations such as Chipotlanes, or pick-up windows dedicated to mobile orders at stores.
But Starbucks' production changes are only part of the solution, the employee in North Carolina told BI.
The employee said that management at his store has cut hours. Last year, he worked between 30 and 40 hours a week and made about $30,000 at Starbucks, he said. So far this year, most of his weeks involve working between 20 and 30 hours. The store's hours have not changed, the employee added.
The cuts have been persistent over the last few years, the employee told BI. "When we came back from Covid, they started saying things like 'Sales are down, so we're going to have to cut back on store payroll,'" which was fine, but it just continued," he said.
Starbucks' own numbers back this up. As of October last year, the company had about 219,000 workers in the US in company-operated stores, about a 12% drop from 2022.
In May, Starbucks said that it considers a variety of factors in deciding how to staff its stores, including past sales at a particular store and planned promotions. Starbucks' statement was responding to a Bloomberg story published the same month about the chain's long wait times and staffing challenges.
"Adding more partners is not the only solution to reduce customer wait times or produce a better Starbucks experience," the company said, pointing to the Siren Craft System.
"Each store has unique staffing and partner needs, and our goal is to balance partner expectations with store needs, which means taking a store-by-store approach to creating schedules, rooted in both partner feedback and analytical tools," a Starbucks spokesperson told BI.
"To help determine the number of hours a store needs each week, Starbucks has a highly sophisticated staffing model, and we incorporate a robust data set to forecast store-specific staffing needs throughout each day," the spokesperson said.
But at the North Carolina store, there are still fewer workers on duty on most shifts, the employee said. Employees at the store often find themselves jumping between taking orders at the register and then preparing the beverages themselves. That's led to customers waiting longer just to place their orders — and, often, waiting as long as 30 minutes to get them as well.
"It only takes one or two customers that are coming in to really start throwing things into chaos when you don't have every spot being managed at the same time," the employee said.
Do you work at Starbucks or another major restaurant chain and have a story idea to share? Reach out to this reporter at abitter@businessinsider.com