Hi, my name is Cory and I’m one of the Idea Partners for Starbucks. I work in store development, the team of people that find great places to open stores, and then design, build and maintain them. I’ve been reading the posts as they come in, and wasn’t surprised to see that there is a lot of passion about seating in our stores. There’s also wide variety in the preferences people have about what they sit on while they’re visiting us.
Despite the impressions some of you have about the shrinking size of our stores, I can vouch for the fact that our average store size has been steadily increasing over the past 15 years, and the stores we opened last year hit an all-time high in average square footage. And yet, while we continue to make more room for our customers, we consistently hear from you that there either isn’t enough seating or the seating options could use some improvement.
The Italian coffeehouse experience that inspired Howard Schultz many years ago is still our “true north” for design. People gathering, lingering, sharing coffee and ideas, and building their sense of community is our ideal vision for each and every Starbucks. And then there’s the reality of twenty-first century life – with jobs, compressed time schedules, business meetings, long commutes, limited family bonding time – customers are looking to include Starbucks in that lifestyle. We like to say “yes” as frequently as possible, which means we have designed stores and seating options to meet a diversity of needs and moods. Many of the ideas you have suggested have already been incorporated into a number of stores: bar seating, cushy couches, small meeting tables, large conference-style tables, hard seats, settees … I see all of these options within 10 miles of my house. I guess that’s one advantage of living in Seattle.
The challenging part is putting in the right mix of seating options to accommodate the way we expect customers in each neighborhood to use the space(here we are, back to the space problem). Sometimes we get it right, and other times we try to adjust the seating to our customers’ needs when we renovate a store. The balancing act of more seating for business and studying versus the living room couch and overstuffed chairs is further complicated by factors such as durability, how easy it is to clean, how flexible a seating option can be, and our desire to make it look really great, too. I know the paralysis I get when shopping for new furniture for my home – it’s just as challenging when we shop for furniture for our stores!
For the past decade or so, we’ve also been dedicated to finding new ways to minimize our environmental footprint. Lighting and energy consumption has been a big focus, and now we’re looking at everything used to build and outfit a store. Furniture and casework is definitely a part of this, so don’t be surprised to see “green” chairs and tables in the stores in the future.
The design studio at our Seattle Support Center area is filled with a mind-boggling variety of color, material and shapes of samples. We have a saying at Starbucks, “every store is a snowflake”. While there are many similarities between our stores, no space is exactly the same and no neighborhood is exactly the same either. We have recently rededicated ourselves to making each store as tailor-fit to its community as possible, which includes every design element.
We hope you like what you see as we make some of our ideas, and yours, come to life.