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The Coffee Warehouse
- axus 10mo agoMobile customers are a kind of second-class citizen for McDonalds, though they have instructed the drive-through salespeople to always lead with "Will you be using the mobile app today?". MCD uses location tracking to only submit the mobile order once you are in range of the store. Should probably add that in-store customers are third-class citizens; drive-through orders without customization get priority.
- craig_s_bell 10mo ago> MCD uses location tracking to only submit the mobile order once you are in range of the store Interesting. Can they be certain that the device from which one places the order, is also taken along for the ride? Some people might order from a separate phone or tablet, which stays at home. Perhaps all of this customer's devices have the McD's app; and any one of them may trigger the order, by approaching the store.
- zikduruqe 10mo agoYeah, if you use the mobile app, your GPS icon lights up until you get there. Crazy invasive. Guess they want to see how far you drive and what route you get to get there. It's best to get your order code, leave your phone at home and just pull up and say "I have order EM14..."
- rconti 10mo agoI haven't used the McDonalds mobile app in the drive-thru line. Can you clarify the experience? Why would I use the mobile app once I'm already at the drive-thru? For points/payment? Or for ordering as well? I once ordered ahead using the mobile app at a Starbucks. I got out of my car, only to find the doors locked, as they closed early for some reason. So I had to get BACK in my car, and sit in the drive-thru queue, just to pick up my already-completed drink, which I found infuriating. (actually, what was infuriating was that I really only order at that location to use their restroom, which of course was an option unavailable in the drive-thru for hygenic reasons)
- axus 10mo agoIt's useful for large orders where everyone wants time to review the menu and/or customize the toppings. Will spend a few minutes entering everyone's order to the app and checking out. At the drive-through speaker spend 10 seconds saying the code instead of 90 seconds ordering, with no chance of mistakes. The line still needs time to move, so the time savings isn't as big as it sounds, the order accuracy is what I appreciate. You might save another 30 seconds at the payment window, they ask if you had a mobile order and then give you the receipt. If the line has moved too efficiently, you will receive your drinks and be asked to wait in a reserved parking spot. This is the "time-out corner" for patrons with too many customizations on their large order, its still more convenient than picking up inside. In 5 minutes someone will bring the rest of the order to you. The app has "20% off orders over $15" as a large incentive to use it.
- ljsocal 10mo agoInteresting analysis. If you’re into efficient operations, consider making coffee at home/office and either make your own banana bread (easy and far tastier!) or skip it!
- GuinansEyebrows 10mo agoand if you're out and about, go to a local coffee shop - hell, even a local chain (even if you're in seattle -- ESPECIALLY if you're in seattle).
- astura 10mo agoStarbucks is MUCH more efficient than any local place. I usually prefer going to (some of) the local places for many reasons, but efficiency isn't one of them.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- GuinansEyebrows 10mo agowell, for maximum caffeine efficiency, you have to do things that are not considered socially acceptable in public places. or at least just go to a gas station and buy a 5-hour energy. or trucker speed.
- cycomanic 10mo agoI find fascinating how the efficiency of local coffee shops differs based on country. If you go to a place with good/excellent coffee in e.g. the US or Sweden they typically have the latest and fanciest equipment, and the coffee making seems like a ritual taking forever. In contrast go to a cafe in Italy or Sydney or Melbourne and the baristas pump out coffees and a ridiculous speed all often at a quality better than those artisanal places elsewhere. I think it's mainly a function of the number and type (i.e. demanding a good coffee not Starbucks slop) of customers you serve. It really does not require ridiculous warehouse style efficiency optimisations. Incidentally in countries like Australia or Italy Starbucks has not made significant inroads apart from some tourist areas.
- pjdesno 10mo agoI've got to say, there's nothing more infuriating than standing in front of a register while everyone behind the counter is busy working on online orders that won't get picked up for quite a while, as evidenced by their repeatedly calling out names for the online orders waiting forlornly at the end of the counter. (this is at a campus Dunkies where there's no drive-through, and I have a hard deadline to start my lecture. If there's no line at the register, and I've got five minutes before class starts in a room down the hall, it shouldn't take a logistical genius to get me a regular coffee in time for class)
- Smoofer 10mo agoPlace an online order ahead of time?
- 1123581321 10mo agoAt Starbucks, I usually just get a cup of black coffee. Often the barista dispenses it as I'm paying, skipping the queue of orders to be made. However, sometimes I get my coffee cup put into the queue. When this happens, starting this year, it seems they'll carry it out to my table. Before that, they'd put it into the queue of orders which could take awhile. It seems partially barista dependent and partially whether they need to rebrew. I've found that asking for "whatever's brewed" doesn't help; they don't want to pick a blend. Interesting to think about. Local coffee shop baristas are more transparent about what's brewed and enjoy taking the opportunity to recommend a certain roast or origin if I'm not picky. However, their systems fall down when they're unexpectedly busy. My local cafe that does both coffee and sandwiches (dine-in, to go and catering) is possibly the worst, not taking orders until they feel caught up on the sandwiches. You can end up waiting 10+ minutes just to get a cup of coffee. From a queueing/distribution perspective, they should be taking those orders constantly and letting them pile up so they have more information about what they need to make and they can reduce the mean wait time. On the other hand, their baffling system is charming and the people placing large orders love the attention and spend way more money than I do. :)
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- Bluecobra 10mo agoThe Starbucks locations near me recently replaced their brewed coffee with on-demand coffee machines for each flavor, so I guess we are all destined to wait in the queue for coffee.
- 1123581321 10mo agoAh, that's terrible news!
- gruez 10mo ago>replaced their brewed coffee with on-demand coffee machines for each flavor like, k-cup style?
- 10mo ago
- anovikov 10mo agoWhen they removed most of the seating and rearranged things in a way that made people understand that sitting there for prolong periods was no longer welcome, and at the same time made their coffee available as nespresso capsules, what was the point of going there anymore? To eat shitty sugar-laden, calorie-heavy desserts? On GLP-1 i can't get a bit of those anymore.
- p3p2o 10mo agoThe sandwich shop on campus years ago always had a long (20+ people) line, for almost the entire time they were open. There would be a few lulls each day, where you could be one of two or three people waiting, especially during afternoon classes. To reduce line sizes, the sandwich vendors created an app and call-in number for mobile orders, which were prioritized over the counter service. The result was you would be one of two people waiting at the counter during the afternoon lull, while fifty tickets printed and the 2-3 employees solely did online orders. How you prioritize mobile orders might be the biggest factor in keeping/eliminating counter service.
- d1sxeyes 10mo agoStarbucks might have to worry less about their revenue if they brought customers like me back into the fold by not firing labour organisers, and engaging in meaningful discussions about what being a “partner” in a business means.
- IncreasePosts 10mo agoHow many people are boycotting Starbucks like you because of this? Realistically this is your personal crusade and while you want Starbucks to change themselves for you, I doubt it would really move the needle at all on the sales slump they're having.
- marxisttemp 10mo agoI am.
- d1sxeyes 10mo agoMaybe. All I know is that I used to buy Starbucks quite often, and I don’t any more. If I divide total transactions by total number of Starbucks, it works out around 2500 visits per week. On my own, I’m not moving the needle. But only 25 people thinking like me is a 1% reduction.
- mathgeek 10mo agoUnless social justice is really seeing a renaissance, it's indeed far more likely that "things are getting expensive and I don't want to pay $6+ for as many cups of coffee as I used to" is the main cause.
- calmbonsai 10mo agoYou can not efficiently demarcate workloads in a coffee shop the same way you do in a warehouse due many factors including: the lack of transparency in the work done by the work units and the unpredictability of how a single work-unit can impact the entire plant. The queue management models that work for banks, grocery stores, and warehouses do not fit the highly interdependent plant operations of a coffee shop--Poisson doesn't cut it. At any given time, there's a good deal of work contained in the "head cache" of the workers (lack of transparency) and orders are (largely) interdependent due to the limited throughput and cornucopia of wait-states of the components that process them. For a better analog, look at the classic French "brigade de cuisine" system developed by Escoffier and watch videos of high-end restaurants during service. Pay particular attention to the expediter and notice how there's specialization, redundancy in labor, and semaphoring to manage exceptions, wait-states, and accommodate the entirety of the workload. None of those strategies can be utilized (at-scale) in a coffee-shop due to vastly different expectations of workload processing timeline, quality, variance, available labor, expected margin, and physical plant size. A large fast-food restaurant is middle-ground between these extremes.
- jt2190 10mo ago> ... there's a good deal of work contained in the "head cache" of the workers (lack of transparency)... Is this true in a Starbucks? Every order goes into the computer before it's made, whether via the app or at the register. Or are you referring to something else more specific, like performing and recording the individual steps in making a speciality coffee?
- calmbonsai 10mo agoCorrect. Unless it's, essentially, a single-step order (black coffee), I'm referring to the "steps to completeness" of any given sub-component of an order--usually specialty drinks or modifications to food prep (heating). In a truly transparent system, one worker could take the place of another one by knowing which steps of an order have been completed, but that's not how their ticketing system works--nor should it. In practice, hand-offs are done to other workers only for specialized low-variance duties (register).
- sinab 10mo agoThe app, "SnackPass", faces a similar issue. Coffee shops spend time fulfilling mobile orders, placed in advance to avoid waiting in line, resulting in a delay for in-person orders. While I was unable to view the entire article (paywalled), I suspect that some kind of priority queue that weights an order's priority by the user's distance to the store may be useful to solve the waiting issue.
- deepsquirrelnet 10mo agoAnd after they improved their operational efficiency, they announced, “Now that we have improved our efficiency, we can lower prices” and they all had a good chuckle and said “see you next quarter, Bob”.
- keypusher 10mo agoThere are some clear parallels to me here from task scheduling algorithms, which I suppose businesses have been reinventing and tweaking for many years. For instance, emergency rooms often use something like priority scheduling, where high priority tasks get scheduled first, but can classically lead to starvation of low-priority tasks such as sitting in the waiting room for a long time with a minor injury. Starbucks wants to maximize throughput while minimizing wait time, but up until now they were just placing all orders into the same FIFO queue and popping them off one at a time? With occasional Shortest-Job-First exceptions (ex. just a black coffee). That seems fairly naive. Something that feels like a slight improvement to me would be having 2 queues (in-person and online, no reason to separate walk-up and drive-through), and alternate popping off from each of them. Or a priority queue? Maybe there is more you could do to maximize throughput, such as batching together food that needs to be heated, or surfacing to the barista how many pending shots need to be pulled for the entire queue so they can just crank out espresso during busy times. Curious if anyone with more experience in the domain has better ideas.
- lukevp 10mo agoThe important part of the article is behind a paywall… how is everyone reading the article and commenting? Are they paying? even archive.is doesn’t remove the paywall.
- Galxeagle 10mo agoThe key insight here is the same reason why every internal department service eventually goes to a ticket system - adding queues (and by extension delays) improves efficiency. Resources can be used at 100% capacity ('always more work to do'), you can offer good service to only those who matter (i.e exec VIPs), and you can batch work (pour 2+ cups of brewed coffee at once). Unfortunately it means that any time you need anything from someone outside your team, it comes with a lead time of '3-5 business days' unless you know the magic words or you raise it up the chain.
- yodon 10mo agoNot directly related, but does anyone know why McDonald's moved away from the "number 1", "number 2", "number 3" ordering style they developed, which significantly reduced the amount of time a typical customer takes to place their order (enabling more turns at the register/ordering screen without preventing customers from making non-numeric-based orders) and moved to their current in-store signage which feels almost explicitly designed to increase order time and customer cognitive load at the register? The main screens over the register offer the eyes no structural guidance on how to scan the contents, so every word and line has to be read individually. The clutter around the words makes recognition more difficult. The sequencing of content on and off of the screens means the desired information is frequently not visible at all and the customer is forced to wait for it to rotate back into visibility.
- relaxing 10mo agoUpsell opportunity. Remember the number ordering was originally for “extra value meals” that purported to save via bundling. Over the decades the perception of value was lost, hence the move to à la cart, luring consumers with more variety.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- parliament32 10mo agoPaywalled halfway through