How Hard Could It Be?: Good System, Bad System

Starbucks' meticulous policy manual shows employees how to optimize profits. Too bad it undercuts basic customer service.

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I pass six Starbucks (NASDAQ:SBUX) every morning on my walk to work.

Just to clarify, that's counting only the Starbucks that are actually on the west side of Eighth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. I think there are some branches on the east side, but that side remains terra incognita for me; for most New Yorkers, micro-optimizing the walk to work is a matter of habit, and I have no reason to cross the street. For all I know, the other side of Eighth Avenue consists of nothing but pachinko parlors and flea circuses. Wouldn't surprise me one bit.

One morning last week, I walked into a Starbucks on 58th Street at precisely the peak of the morning rush, to discover that this particular Starbucks had deployed a new type of employee. This employee wore a radio headset. Her main job was to go down the line of people waiting to order and ask them what they wanted in advance of their arriving at the cash register. There, they would be asked to repeat their order before paying and finally joining the line of customers waiting for their drinks to appear.

This premature order taking did not appear to improve the store's productivity. The cashiers still had to take the same number of orders, wait for the customers to fiddle with their purses for the correct change, and so forth. The coffee producers -- known theatrically in the trade as baristas -- still had to make the same number of drinks. The biggest benefit of the procedure, I thought, was that the barista got started on a drink a few seconds earlier, so people got their orders filled a little bit faster, even though the overall rate of output for the store was the same.

A network engineer would say this was a situation of "same bandwidth, lower latency" and then probably launch into a story about how the post office, mailing millions of DVDs (and a few letters) around the world every day, has the highest bandwidth of any network on earth, with far greater capacity than the biggest fiber-optic backbone, but with high latency -- so you wouldn't want to use it for, say, telephony. And this would be extremely hilarious to the network engineer. That's the kind of joke they tell.

Anyway, the extra order taker I encountered that morning was not, to be completely candid, the sweetest strawberry in the patch. She was barking commands like the Sergeant Major in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life ("Anyone got anything they'd RATHER be doing than marching UP and DOWN the square?"). I watched with astonishment as she got into an altercation with a customer because the customer wanted to pick up her warm egg -- like sandwich at the front counter rather than walking around to the back counter. This was obviously an extreme violation of the Sergeant Major's sense of order. "They're not allowed to give it to you up here!" she kept shouting at the poor customer, who was almost speechless with shock that a company whose customer service mantra is "Just say yes" would rather argue with her than pass her a sandwich she had paid for.

Isn't it a bit odd that Starbucks had gone to the trouble of paying someone to stand around the front of the shop, getting into squabbles with loyal customers, making people repeat their orders, while not even increasing the total number of Frappuccino Blended Coffees that could be produced per unit of time?

I thought so, too. I turned to the wonder box of knowledge on my desk and found a website called Starbucks Gossip (starbucksgossip.typepad.com), where an entire community of highly literate Starbucks employees (excuse me, Corporate prefers to call them partners) gathers to exchange gossip and share their thoughts on hot topics such as whether nonfat drinks should be called skinny.

Reading through the site, I discovered that there is a whole world of esoteric knowledge about how to sell handmade coffee drinks in the gigantic quantities that make Starbucks profitable.

For example, I learned from the website that the woman I had seen in the headset taking orders was officially called an expediter -- but the job title is something of a red herring, according to the collective wisdom of the Starbucks staff members chatting on the site.

Expediters are not really there to see to it that a customer's order is filled more quickly, they believe. Rather, expediters exist solely to prevent people in line from giving up and wandering off, maybe to go to the Dunkin' Donuts around the corner. Once a customer places an order, the logic goes, he or she feels an ethical obligation to wait for it to be filled, no matter how long the process takes. Expediters are there to lock in that order as soon as possible.

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