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Have you found a friendly little message on your cup at Starbucks recently, like “Yum” or “Have a great day!!!”? Did it make you smile? Nice. Well, how would you feel knowing the barista hated having to do that and their boss pressured them to do it?
Of all the recent changes at Starbucks, I think cup writing is the one that stinks. Leave it!
When Starbucks’ new CEO Brian Niccol took over last fall, one of his big goals was to bring back the cozy coffee house vibes of Starbucks in the ’90s and ’00s.
This is a great goal! In recent years, Starbucks has made huge pushes toward mobile ordering and curbside pickup. In some cases, this has wreaked havoc on baristas’ efficiency and led to disappointed customers picking up melted Frappuccinos or lukewarm lattes. Worse, it left less time for baristas to offer genuinely excellent customer service. Niccol said that he believed that mobile ordering had “chipped away” at the brand’s “soul.” I don’t disagree!
Some of Starbucks’s recent changes include streamlining the menu, ditching some of the less popular, complicated drinks that probably slowed efficiency, and starting to charge for extra syrups and powders (which I think is good — go ahead and charge more for extra ingredients instead of raising the price on my plain coffee!) The company also started investing more in human labor over machines to make drinks, reversing an earlier trend.
One change in particular, however, is not great: the new “standard” (as a Starbucks rep described it to me) of having baristas write little messages on the cups for customers.
The aim here is fine: it’s cute, feels personalized, and might make the customer feel more of a human connection with Starbucks as a place where real people work instead of a free bathroom location that happens to have an app for coffee. I can see the upside.
“At Starbucks, creating a warm, welcoming environment is at the heart of who we are,” Abigail Covington, a representative for Starbucks, told Business Insider. “We believe in the power of genuine human connection — and we know that even the smallest gesture, like a handwritten note on a cup, can spark joy for our customers and partners [employees] alike.”
But this comes at a cost for the workers: they have to spend time writing on cups, which potentially bogs down service time. And even if they skip it at rush hour and only do it during slower times, it still adds an extra chore.
Browsing the subreddit for Starbucks employees, the feelings are mixed. Some commenters have said they love it — they have a list of puns and creative sayings, and they enjoy doing it as a creative expression. “As someone who loves to draw cute little doodles a lot, I love this,” one Redditor wrote.
But there’s also a lot of grumbles about it. One commenter said that as a stickler for food safety, they worry about contamination with the marker being touched onto cups (that seems… less worrisome to me). Most gripes were about how it was difficult to keep up the writing during rush, especially at drive-thrus.
A more sticky issue is how this mandatory joy is being enforced. One person wrote that their store manager warned them that failure to write on cups would result in a final warning (a rep for Starbucks questioned this, saying this isn’t how their progressive discipline policy would work.) Several other workers chimed in to say that their bosses had reinforced the need to do this, while others said their bosses would let it slide, especially during busy times. It’s easy to see how a chain with thousands of locations in the US might do things slightly differently at each store when it comes to nitty gritty management details, and that some amount of discretion is left up to bosses.
Ultimately, that leaves me, as a customer, wondering: Is it worth having this cute little phrase written on my cup if I knew that the author was forced to do it?
Like most humans, I enjoy great customer service. I know that offering exceptional service and having positive interactions with customers can also make you feel great. (I worked in a Starbucks as a summer job as a teen.) Brightening someone’s day — even just a little— feels good!
That cutesy phrase written on my cup doesn’t exactly feel personal and human if I know that workers are mandated or even strongly encouraged to do it, and may, in fact, hate doing it.
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