Brian Niccol has to get hold of 200,000 Sharpies so he can bring back a classic Starbucks tradition

In 2012, Starbucks said it wanted to be on first-name terms with its customers, with baristas wearing name tags on their aprons and visitors leaving with personalized cups. Since then the tradition has somewhat waned, but Niccol is determined to bring it back.

“We’re tracking down the Sharpies,” Niccol told CNBC in an interview yesterday. “We’re going to get back to writing little notes on the cups. It may not be everybody’s name … but we will definitely be getting back to writing on our cups again in the not-too-distant future.”

Niccol estimates he needs to track down some 200,000 Sharpies in order to bring back the practice. “Unfortunately it’s not as simple as going to Staples and picking up some Sharpies,” Niccol said. “That’s the power of our scale.”

A return to the classic Starbucks offering has been at the heart of Niccol’s campaign since taking on the top job at the $111 billion coffee chain in August.

The new CEO oversaw his first earnings call this week and outlined a raft of measures to streamline the business and make service more convenient for patrons. Among the changes will be the return of condiment bars supplying milk and sugar (meaning customers can serve themselves instead of asking a barista), as well as the elimination of additional charges for nondairy milk alternatives.

On top of that, Niccol confirmed the chain would be paring back its “overly complex menu” to align more closely with its “core identity” as a coffee company.

“The customization and making the coffee or the drink personally yours, that’s something we’re going to continue to do,” Niccol told CNBC the day after the earnings call.

“But we are going to put some guardrails on some of the customization, because some of it frankly ruins the beverage, and it really ruins the experience for everybody involved.

“We have to strike a balance to make sure we protect the integrity of the drink, the integrity of the experience, and give people, still, the experience that they’re after.”

The commuter issue

Under previous CEO Laxman Narasimhan, Starbucks’ popularity with morning commuters became something of a problem. On the company’s Q2 2024 earnings call, the former CEO noted that the brand’s loyal customers were downloading the company’s app to order their beverages en route to work, but were abandoning their orders before purchase because of wait times.

This was a particular issue because the majority—60%—of the coffee company’s morning sales came from reward members ordering via the app.

“Despite strong mobile order and pay [MOP] sales, we saw a mid-teens-percent order incompletion rate within the order channel this past quarter,” Narasimhan told Wall Street analysts in May. “In other words, customers using MOP put items into their cart and sometimes chose not to complete their order, citing long wait times of product and availability.”

Niccol clearly identified this issue on Wednesday’s earnings call and announced measures to rectify the problem with “commonsense guardrails.”

“We’ll bring order to MOP so it doesn’t overwhelm our cafés,” he added. “At peak, it can drive an influx of orders that can be difficult to sequence and quickly deliver to our customers.”

In time, further moves will be made to separate mobile orders from the café experience, he added.

“We understand the challenges, the frustrations that people may have interacting with the Starbucks brand, and we’re going to fix those and remove those friction points,” Niccol told CNBC.

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