So I work for a Starbucks Pick-up Store located within an urban shopping center in a major city. This is the first time I had ever been introduced to the concept, which(for all who don’t know) is that you can order your goodies on the Starbucks app, it queues to us, we prepare it, and you pick it up.

The concept removed the traditional cafe design and went with a ~20 sq ft lobby design with no seating. Which makes sense because you’re solely there to pick up your order, rather than hang out. Theres also a giant screen that shows all queued and ready orders.

To me, this design seems very cool and modern in concept because the customer interaction is minimized in order to prioritize a fast paced transaction. However, in practice I feel as though this concept falls short in some ways due to the fact that we can still take cafe orders, and there’s no way for us to reenforce guests to utilize it according to its intended design—at least, without walking the line of turning people away. (which will make it hard to pay the bills)

This didn’t really bother me at first because that was already what Starbucks was. However, granting customers the ability to still have the convenience of ordering inside defeats the UX design of the concept, and takes the priority away from its core demographic that it was designed for.

The infrastructure isn’t designed for several people to occupy the lobby, but many of our customers still bombard the store for immediate orders rather than ordering online. This happens while our many online customers are still sending in orders. This leaves us in many scenarios where cafe orders get prioritized over our mobile guests and the other way around because cafe guests will still utilize us as a cafe.

I wouldn’t mind prioritizing orders as they print if it were just mobile orders, because there’s a giant screen that shows the orders in order of when they were pulled. But the design just doesn’t tend to work efficient enough when we are getting hit from both sides.

I know that this problem isn’t the same as some drive thrus that have the customers ordering mobile while in the drive thru, but it does scratch at my brain because our store was designed like this for the purpose of prioritizing mobile orders.

Nonetheless, still less stressful than a regular cafe store/drive thru. Any baristas at a pickup store see it a different way?