Think – Write – Connect

Until the Spring of 2007, Starbucks Coffee did not carry 2% milk in their inventory.  When customers ordered 2% milk, their order was fulfilled by mixing whole milk and skim milk.  Having a corporate culture very much driven by internal operations, ordering 2% milk was generally fairly complicated.  In  most locations in North America, there was a general back and forth between staff and customers until everyone agreed, “Just mix the skim and whole milk and let’s move on!”.  In the State of Texas, however, you had to specifically use the descriptor “blended”.  Why?  I’m not sure but it was a pretty “in your face” requirement across the state and wasn’t used anywhere else in North America.  Outside of the United States, the problem worsened.   An example would be the term “half skinny” which was a standard request in the UK.  In May of 2007, however, the end appeared in site as Starbucks made a cost cutting move which standardized on 2% for all of their drinks–think again.

As of May 2007, Starbuck’s internal operations changed the Starbucks vocabulary to eliminate the word 2%.  After all, 2% milk was the default thus there was no need to declare it as a descriptive word when refering to a variation in a product.  The problem is, the rest of North America, continued to view 2% milk as simply a type of milk.  Thus, when customers ordered their drink with 2% milk, the strict operations driven culture at Starbucks all but mandated that hourly employees respond to the customer with “2% is our standard milk”.  They couldn’t just mentally translate the request, it had to become a source of confrontation.  Hence, discussion at the cash register broke out between customer and employee causing more confusion than even the vintage days of baristas making on the fly versions of 2% milk by “blending” (Texas talk) whole and skim milk.  Is the fact that Starbucks has made something as simple as 2% milk so complicated something indicative of their corporate culture that will haunt their ability to deal with customer satisfaction perceptions that already plague the company?  Do the Seattle based geniuses that run the company know something that we don’t making our view of a world that includes 2% milk completely out of date?  How did it get so complicated?

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