Starbucks To Open 2,000 Stores By 2025

Alpha8472
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Starbucks To Open 2,000 Stores By 2025

Post by Alpha8472 »

They are going to open 2,000 net new stores.

Starbucks will revamp stores to make them more efficient except in union stores. Union stores will get no improvements.

The company wants to focus on making operations faster and use less labor. There will be a push towards drive-thru, pickup only, and delivery only. It makes sense. Starbucks wants to be a drive-thru fast food restaurant. They want to churn out profitable drinks as efficiently as McDonald's churns out fast food. Sit down Starbucks restaurants do not make as much money as cheap bare bones drive-thru locations. Eliminate those expensive employees and automate as much as they can.

To get to 2,000 new stores they would probably have build tiny Dutch Bros style drive thru kiosks. They are cheap and churn out tons of drinks to overflowing drive thru lines.

https://www.csnews.com/starbucks-make-m ... ntion-plan
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Re: Starbucks To Open 2,000 Stores By 2025

Post by storewanderer »

Their "efficiency" is a bit of a challenge for them. Not sure why their employees seem to be so troubled by mobile orders as those make it far easier for the employee. I think there is a problem with the current quality of employee.

The "net" number is interesting. This implies there will actually be more new stores, but some existing ones will close.

I'm not convinced there is room for this many new stores. However there are likely going to be a lot of failures in the restaurant/fast food industry in the short term. It is possible we will see Starbucks pick up even more legacy chain drive through sites and open new stores.
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Re: Starbucks To Open 2,000 Stores By 2025

Post by Romr123 »

I thought it interesting them talking about greater efficiency on the Frappucino---I'm not a fan, but my husband is. When I compare it to Tim Horton's iced cappuccino it's no contest--TH is far more efficient. For those unaware, Frappucino is ice, drink base, flavoring/espresso, and dairy blended together individually in a blender (Vitamix).

TH iced cappuccino (I'm pretty sure) is a dried mix blended at store level with water and dispensed through a soft serve machine. Drink is constructed by adding dairy (their normal half-and-half) and syrup (if mocha or other flavoring desired) to a plastic tumbler-ful of the soft-frozen drink, then spun for a few moments (literally a second or two--the consistency is much thinner than, say a McDonalds' shake)on a Multimixer. Cap and serve. There's no dairy in the soft-serve machine (which simplifies that machine a good bit and makes sanitation far easier)

Obviously, the coffee base-flavoring isn't optimum for Starbucks' use, but it's not beyond the wit of man to make the soft-serve neutral and add the flavorings by syrup; half of the Frappucino novelty is are the topical sprinkles/mixins.
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Re: Starbucks To Open 2,000 Stores By 2025

Post by buckguy »

Beyond whatever mechanics they roll out for making drinks, the whole thing sounds like a new CEO setting down a mark and trying to make shareholders happy. The cold drinks probably are more iced coffee than fraps esp during morning periods—not much to change there. The employee benefits are an obvious attempt against unionization and sound like tweets rather than anything new. Deprifessionalizing the barista role may actual help foster union drives.

Starbucks has had drive throughs, kiosks, and various limited service spaces for a long time and these formats have their limitations and may work more or less well with the flow of customers dusting the day. Drive throughs become an annoyance during peak periods. The kiosks often seem low volume and some of their limited service prototypes have been failures—-there used to be a very stripped down store in Boston with no food items and only the most popular drinks—-it fit in a small ground floor space but didn’t last long.

Not mentioned here is that they have significant competition in urban areas from regional chains like Stumptown, Philz, le Colombe, as well as some strong local chains like Compass in DC and an Australian chain Bluestone that has been going national. Peet’s also has started opening stores again. Some of these competitors have done better than others. San Francisco’s Blue Bottle seems to have fizzled in its East Coast expansion. Still, most of them could easily go into various kinds suburban spaces and erode Starbucks there. They also could get their coffee featured by breakfast places which has been a common approach used by local roasters and….by Starbucks. The main point here is that they have significant competition and the goal of 2000 new outlets seems to have. Alotof potential bumps.
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Re: Starbucks To Open 2,000 Stores By 2025

Post by storewanderer »

Note they do not specify how many of these will be Corporate, Freestanding, Licensee, etc. Maybe they are going to try to go heavier into airports again; it seems like they are still present in most major airports but with fewer locations than they once had as more regional coffee chains also start to show a presence in some spot at these airports taking a space where Starbucks once was.

Also I wonder if they could try to convert some of these "we proudly brew Starbucks" like you see in certain hotels, into actual Licensed Starbucks, to push the unit count up further.

I agree with buckguy here I don't see the demand. I also see what seems to be a lot of operational issues with a chain that was previously very well run. I think they need to get their operation in order before doing a major expansion in an already saturated market. The new CEO does not start until October 1, so I doubt this was his idea. Almost feels like he is being set up to fail.
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Re: Starbucks To Open 2,000 Stores By 2025

Post by babs »

storewanderer wrote: September 15th, 2022, 1:20 am Their "efficiency" is a bit of a challenge for them. Not sure why their employees seem to be so troubled by mobile orders as those make it far easier for the employee. I think there is a problem with the current quality of employees
The mobile orders are not easier. You are presented with so many options in the app, you really have hundreds of different ways customize a drink. Before the app, I would just go in and order a plain latte. Now I change the drink up all the time. And I know everyone does this. Starbucks created its own problems by allowing way too many options. What used to be a simple drink is now a customized complex formula that takes longer for their employees to interpret aand create. Not surprised it's lead to so many issues.
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Re: Starbucks To Open 2,000 Stores By 2025

Post by Brian Lutz »

Here in Starbucks' "home turf" it seems like Dutch Bros. has been expanding significantly over the past few years, along with some of the other local/regional chain "kiosk" competitors. Around here some of the notable ones are Bigfoot Java. Diedrich Espresso and Gourmet Latte, each of which have somewhere between 15-30 locations scattered around the area and continue to expand. And there's plenty of smaller kiosk places as well, including the notorious "Bikini Barista" places where the coffee is served by scantily clad women (with the occasional outbreaks of scandal/empty regulatory threat that you would expect from that type of thing.) Starbucks is still dominant in this market, but you get the sense that they won't be forever. There used to be a lot more competition in full-line stores when places like Tully's and Seattle's Best were around, but with exception of a handful of Peet's Coffee locations and Woods Coffee (based in Bellingham with about 19 locations currently) most of those are gone. One odd thing to note is that even though Tully's no longer exists in Seattle where it originated, there are still over 600 Tully's locations in Japan.

Of course Seattle is an edge case when it comes to espresso, and I suspect they have much less competition to deal with elsewhere.
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Re: Starbucks To Open 2,000 Stores By 2025

Post by babs »

In downtown Portland as well as in other areas, they have closed a ton of shops due to both safety issues and a drop in business..I do think there is room for additional drive thru locations in the Portland market to replace some of these cafes. Also, idowntown would be a perfect market for pickup only stores with no seating or bathrooms to address the crime and bathroom abuse issues.

A lot of Starbucks locations are either overrun with traffic in their drivethrus during peak times or handle.more business than they can handle. For instance at the Washington Square mall location, there used to be two locations, they closed one during the pandemic and the remaining location can no longer handle the business so I see people leave rather than wait in line. I was just at the Portland airport. It took about 20 minutes to get my coffee due to overcrowding...unacceptable for an airport location. I think they have room to grow but have to be selective and strategic about how they do it.
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Re: Starbucks To Open 2,000 Stores By 2025

Post by BreakingThrough »

I read an article about this that stated that the idea of the "third place" is dead. As if it was a general trend. It's definitely over for Starbucks, but I think there's potential for the concept, especially coming out of COVID. The skinny new Starbucks drive-through locations are a terrible experience if you go inside. You literally feel like you are standing behind the counter in the prep area, and are made to feel like a bother on top of it. Concrete floors, bare minimum decor. Depressing. I was with a Gen Z friend and mentioned how nice Starbucks locations used to be. Carpeted, armchairs, etc. He had only faint memories of stores like that.

I think if someone is able to license "Central Perk" and opened a chain of third-place type coffeehouses, maybe in conjunction with an existing brewer, that they would be very popular.
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Re: Starbucks To Open 2,000 Stores By 2025

Post by Alpha8472 »

Starbucks only cares about profit now. Fancy looking restaurants is an expense to them. They want bare bones cheap drive locations or pick up only locations that churn out drinks quickly for a profit.

Customers that sit for hours and take up space are not profitable to them.
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