Starbucks discovered that eliminating human work in favor of machines does not work for the company, so now the coffee chain is hiring old human baristas in thousands of stores.
The CEO of Starbucks, Brian Niccol, declared in a call with investors earlier this week that the company’s effort to reduce head count in recent years and replace humans with machines had been counterproductive: advanced machinery proved to be an inappropriate substitute for humans.
“In recent years, we have actually been eliminating the delivery of stores, I think that with the hope that the team can eliminate the elimination of labor,” Niccol said in the call, by The guardian. “What we are finding is that it was not a precise assumption with what developed.”
When Niccol joined Starbucks in September 2024, the company had been testing increases in human personnel in just a handful of locations. Niccol expanded the effort this year to include 3,000 locations of the 40,000 coffee chain stores worldwide.
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Niccol declared that the new technology alone is not to cut it. Starbucks needed personnel properly and allowing employees to access new teams to offer better customer experience.
“The team does not solve the customer experience we need to provide, but rather personal stores and implementing this technology behind this,” Niccol said in the call.
Niccol said that the increase in Windail personnel higher costs, but said that “certain growth” will move to the move.
CEO of Starbucks Brian Niccol. Photo by Kevin Sullivan/Digital First Media/Orange County Register through Getty Images
The movement to hire new baristas is part of Niccol’s plan to change Starbucks after five consecutive sales of decline sales. Starbucks reported on Tuesday that sales in the same store fell by 1% in the first quarter of 2025, leaving without expectations of Wall Street.
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Niccol reassured investors in the call that thought that the “disappointing” financial results, Starbucks was “really showing many signs of progress” internally. For example, the average time to deliver orders in the store, decreased by an average of two minutes in the quarter, he said.
Niccol’s plan to go around Starbucks includes limiting the number of items that customers can ask through mobile devices, adding ceramic cups for orders in the store, reducing 30% of the menu, writing the names of customers in cups in acute in acute Acute in acute. As of May 12, Starbucks will also require the baristas to dress uniformly with a solid black upper part and a quaper, black or blue denim -colored denim.
Starbucks Opera 16,941 stores in the United States and has 211,000 US employees. The company’s shares decreased approximately 11% in the year in which it is written.
