While working at Starbucks, I’ve supported many projects in the IT world. Automated ordering has gained quite a lot of momentum on the MyStarbucksIdea.com site. We are always working to find innovative ways to better serve our customers. Through automated ordering we may be able to increase our speed of service and produce a more consistently accurate beverage for our customers. We have an entire project team dedicated to initiatives like this one. We call the project group “Global Store of the Future” and it’s where ideas like automated ordering are researched by our IT Strategy team. As you can probably guess, these ideas require quite extensive technological infrastructure … more »

Greetings to the mystarbucksidea.com Community, My name is Major and I’m lucky to have the unique opportunity to work in Global Coffee & Tea Education along with a small handful of other partners. Gauging from the votes and comments, there’s a strong desire to learn more about coffee. Luckily, that’s easy! Your local store is a fantastic resource. All of our baristas are knowledgeable about a variety of coffees, and while we don’t have a set coffee class program in our stores, you can arrange to have our baristas take you through a guided tasting and help you in your personal coffee journey. We do coffee tastings regularly here, and I thought I’d share one of … more »

I'm Errol Stewart, User Interface Designer for My Starbucks Idea. A lot of people ask what my inspiration was for the visual design of this site. With all modesty in order, it's simply based on our white whole bean coffee bags—available at a Starbucks near you! Enthusiastically arrange the bags around your monitor for a coordinated My Starbucks Idea interactive experience. You, enlightened readers and loyal customers, are our favorite people. If it wasn't for you, we would have no reason to maintain this site. It's important to us (and to me, personally) that your stay is enjoyable and valuable. I frequently peruse this site, reading your ideas, suggestions, and, dare I … more »

The idea to create a separate line for drip coffee customers is one Starbucks has considered. In fact, this concept was tested years ago with favorable results. I spoke with a store manager who tested a brewed coffee line during his busiest hours of the morning and was able to serve drip coffee customers very quickly. The biggest benefit was that these customers did not have to wait behind those wanting espresso beverages or pastries, which can take a bit of time to process. Customers ordering espresso beverages and pastries were also served more quickly since the drip coffee customers were not in their line. Another added benefit was for our baristas. Having an extra partner on the sales floor … more »

I'm an Idea Partner in Seattle and on the Partner Resources (a.k.a. Human Resources) team. It has been great to see the passionate discussions between our customers and partners on this topic over the past few days. I truly appreciate your honesty and different points of view—it's refreshing! As a partner and loyal customer of Starbucks, I definitely understand both perspectives on this idea. Many of you feel that adding names to faces will facilitate a better connection and make the interactions even more personal. On the other hand, some of you feel that it's too formal, it creates a fast-food feel, it's not necessary, or it's too personal. Our store partners are the … more »

It’s been just one week since launch and the My Starbucks Idea team has been (unimaginably) busy reading and commenting on your ideas. We want to say “thank you!” We’ve gotten so many great ideas and so much enthusiasm surrounding those ideas. It’s pretty amazing. Also, we’ve received some great questions/comments from some of you that we thought would be good to share with the entire community—so here it goes: What’s with the duplicate ideas? Yes, we’re seeing a lot of these. In some ways that’s a good thing—great minds think alike—but in terms of votes, it’s diluting them. So we just want to remind everyone to take … more »

This is Kevin Shawver and I work on the Wi-Fi program at Starbucks. First of all, I am excited to see all the energy around free Wi-Fi —we know it is important to our customers. I was secretly hoping that free Wi-Fi would be #1 amongst the popular ideas, but I’ll take #2. Back in February we announced that we're switching to AT&T as our Wi-Fi provider in our U.S. company-operated stores. As Brad Stevens mentioned in his post on March 24, we're thrilled to be rolling out two hours of complimentary Wi-Fi service for customers who have a registered Starbucks Card. It'll be simple to sign up. All you have to do is: Register a Starbucks Card Sign up for an AT&T Wi-Fi … more »