I stood in the Starbucks on Southwest Alder last Thursday for eleven minutes, which I know because I timed it. Four mobile orders came off the handoff counter before mine. The barista apologized twice. She should not have had to.
Brian Niccol has been running the company since September and he has a plan he calls Back to Starbucks. Shorter waits. A shorter menu. Ceramic mugs, the condiment bar, a chair you might actually want to sit in. And less discounting, which he has said out loud: the constant promotional blasts trained everyone to wait for the deal instead of wanting the coffee.
Every one of those calls is right.
None of them is a brand.
Repairing what you broke returns you to zero, and zero has never once been a reason for anyone to walk through a door.
Here is the part that gets lost. Operations are the floor. They are the price of being allowed to compete at all. When the line moves and the order is correct, the customer notices nothing, which is the point. Nobody has ever told a friend about a coffee that arrived on time.
Niccol did this before, at Chipotle, and the version of that story everyone repeats is a story about throughput and digital pickup. That is half of it. The other half is that Chipotle had a specific, repeatable opinion about ingredients, and said it relentlessly, and the operational fixes made the opinion survivable. Belief first. Then the machine that can carry the belief without dropping it.
Starbucks used to have one. The third place: not home, not work, a room you were welcome to occupy for an hour. The company spent a decade trading that room for drive-thru volume and app velocity, then acted surprised when the room emptied. You cannot mobile-order your way to belonging.
So the real question is not whether wait times come down. They will. The question is what the store is for once they do. Salt & Straw has a line out the door on Northeast Alberta in the rain and nobody standing in it is annoyed, because the line is part of the thing. Stumptown never promised speed. It promised a specific opinion about coffee, held a little rudely.
A turnaround plan that only removes friction produces a company nobody complains about and nobody chooses. That is a worse position than being hated.
Nobody has ever told a friend about a coffee that arrived on time.
Truffles and Barnaby hold me to a strict operational standard, which is that food appears at six. They have never once been grateful for it. They are grateful when I sit on the floor with them, which is an entirely different category of thing, and no amount of punctuality has ever substituted for it.