Skip the line. You can do it if you need your daily morning cup of coffee—but only if you order ahead and pay using the Starbucks app on your phone.
Starbucks on Tuesday is expanding its mobile order and pay feature on its app to about 350 company-owned stores in the Chicago area as well as making it available nationwide including in major cities such as New York, San Francisco, Boston and Washington, D.C. Now more than 7,400 company-owned stores in the U.S. will offer coffee lovers the option of ordering ahead and skipping the line at the register.
“It’s most relevant for customers in the morning when there’s a long line,” said Dan Beranek, Starbucks’ director of digital ventures.
Customers crunched for time can place their orders and pay for them through the app before they walk through the door. They’ll be able to see how long it’ll take for their order to be ready at their selected store.
If the wait period shown on the app is five minutes, for example, it’s best to place the order when you’re five minutes away from pickup so you can walk in, grab it to go and walk out. Once the order button is hit on the app, the order gets sent to the store immediately so the barista can get started on it.
The app doesn’t allow the customer to schedule a time to pick up the order. Also, no alert pops up notifying the customer the order is ready.
Starbucks is joining the list of other fast-food restaurants offering similar features on their mobile apps, including Taco Bell, Panera Bread and Chipotle. The Starbucks feature first launched in Portland, Ore., in December 2014; rolled out to Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Alaska in the Pacific Northwest in March; expanded to 17 more states in June and now is offered across the rest of the country.
To use the function on the Apple or Android systems, allow location services for the app so GPS can find the nearest Starbucks. Click on the order option to customize your beverage and select a store to pick up the order. Tap “order” on the app and pay using your registered Starbucks card.
At the store, a sticker listing the customer’s name and order gets printed and slapped on the coffee cup. The customer can walk in, bypass the line at the register and go to the counter, where a barista will call out the mobile order and hand it to the customer. There’s no separate pickup counter for mobile orders.
Aside from helping customers spend less time at the register and eliminating the wait in line, the mobile ordering feature can help ensure order accuracy and give the barista more time to make the drink before the customer gets there, Beranek said.
In general, features like order and pay on apps could affect the number of employees needed to work the register and take orders, said Jackie Dulen Rodriguez, senior manager at Technomic, Chicago-based food service consultant. “But many restaurants are counting on increased efficiency and being able to serve more customers during a lunch rush, for example,” she said. “If that happens, some of the jobs lost to tech devices might be added to preparing food for these additional orders.”
It’s too early to tell if the feature ultimately will impact staffing levels, Beranek said. Starbucks is watching it closely, but they’re not making any changes for now on how stores are staffed in response to the mobile option, he said.