The many reasons your Starbucks coffee now takes 30 minutes to make - and the 'Big Brother' tech they've introduced to speed workers up

No wonder millions of customers have ditched Starbucks after complaining of painfully long waits for a coffee.

Now, the true extent of the collapse in service speed has emerged.   

One in 12 customers now waits between 15 and 30 minutes. Before the pandemic, almost no one waited that long, new figures from industry data experts show. 

Incredibly, during the first three months of this year, one in every 50 orders took more than half an hour.

And there is a very simple reason for all this, we can reveal - and it is not lazy or slow staff.

It is because Starbucks bosses, in a bid to cut costs, are slashing staffing numbers, while at the same time rolling out an ever more complicated drinks menu. 

 

Where there might have been five people making frappucinos a few years ago, there are now just three or four now.

In fact, Starbucks employs fewer people in the US than it did in 2020, yet has opened a 1,000 more outlets since then.

The understaffing is blamed partly on a secret computer program used by bosses.

The software guesses how many staff will be needed for each shift  for each store. It looks at weather, local events, history on busy and quiet times in the past. 

Workers and their managers say it woefully underestimates how long it takes to make drinks. 

Each expresso shot takes 26 seconds, staff say. 

It is not the only technology that is upsetting staff. Another is a quite sinister NBA-style shot clock placed near the drive-thru windows. It flashes red if the staff member talks to a customer for more than 30 seconds 

Starbucks said the clock is for supervisors to see if they need to direct more workers to the drive-thrus.

One Starbucks regular, Chris Mills, told Bloomberg how he waited 40 minutes for a latte he was picking up on Mother's Day for his wife.  He said six baristas were rushed off their feet

He said he loves the  'friendly little handwritten smiley face and a note sometimes on the cup' at his local cafe at the Shelton, Connecticut.

But that day, the consumer products executive said: 'Nobody involved, in my observation, including me, the other customers, and even the staff seemed to be happy.'

Techomic, a data company, looked at the wait times after Starbucks own CEO admitted long waits were a major reason it was losing customers. 

As well as the figures above, they found that those waiting between five and 15 minutes is up too - from 20 per cent to 31 percent.

Three in five do get their coffee int less than five minutes now - which seems OK. But before the pandemic it was four in five served in that time.

Incredibly, one in every 50 customers waits more than half an hour. ONe in a 100 more than an hour. 

Starbucks has had a disastrous start to the year - with tens of millions of customers heading instead to rivals or staying at home.

A key factor in this - which the company's CEO Laxman Narasimhan even admits - is the painfully slow service.

At the start of May, Starbucks reported a shock fall in sales for the first time in nearly three years - and that was at the height of the pandemic. It was only in November it reported record takings.

Multiple factors are to blame - including high prices, customers cutting spending and bad weather - but slow service was highighted by the Starbucks CEO.

Starbucks' growth has come on the back of complicated and customisable drinks like Frappuccinos in the summer or pumpkin spice lattes in the fall - but each can take baristas several minutes to make.