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Taco Bell, for reference, once said it boosted drive-thru speed of service 18 seconds, year-over-year, and served an additional 4.8 million cars. While Starbucks did not detail what “slight” entailed exactly, when you weigh lengthy lines and added volume, it’s likely a significant return. They drove more than half of the company’s net sales, increasing north of 10 percent from pre-COVID levels. stores with drive thrus reported a “slight” improvement in out-the-window times in Q1, Johnson said, and delivered positive same-store sales throughout the period. In this shift, Starbucks spent the past 10-plus, pandemic-riddled months expanding digital reach, enabling curbside pickup, furthering delivery, and, most critically, increasing throughput in the drive thru. The present reality for Starbucks, when you factor work-at-home and COVID’s demolition of day-to-day routines, is the company’s visit has evolved from the stop on the way to a destination to being the destination worth leaving home for, CEO Kevin Johnson said.Īnd so group orders are up (average ticket rose 19 percent in Q1), and so is demand for convenience-something Starbucks didn’t exactly skirt before, but surely wasn’t paragraph 1 of its mission statement.
DRIVE THRU STARBUCKS PASADENA CA FULL
“So we've got considerable work in this area to unlock the full potential for drive thru.” “And those are things like drive-thru only stores that have no seating, very small units, the side-by-side drive-thru lanes that we are bringing on to the footprint,” Brewer said during a conference call. Yet more striking in Starbucks’ case given its history as a gathering concept as much as one that serves coffee.
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Starbucks’ outgoing chief operations officer Roz Brewer, set to leave and become Walgreens CEO at the end of February, teased earlier in the week the “final piece” of the company’s efforts to widen accessibility in preparation for a post-coronavirus world.īrewer called it “the future drive-thru concept,” which appears similar to other models shared by the sector’s largest players in recent months, from McDonalds to Burger King to KFC.
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Yet here’s an example of how customer experience has veered under a COVID-19 umbrella. Starbucks’ “third-place” DNA it built a coffee empire on isn’t vanishing.
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