And a huge waste. I know it's a multi-billion dollar corporation, but waste always upsets me, like I feel bad. A knot in my chest, considering how today's climate is in food insecurity.

Ya it's just a drink, but it costs as much as a value meal at McDonald's practically. Why as a Barista back in 2008, I'd hand abandoned drinks off for free in the lobby anyone just hanging out or waiting for a drink in line, who wants to take it home so it doesn't get canned.

I’d assume it’s a hard decision by corporate. Imagine 60 drinks need to get thrown out, and only 10% of people or so actually come back in and complain they didn’t get their drink because it was too busy. In Starbuck’s eyes (and more specifically their wallet) they still sold over 50 drinks. So if they were to put “wait times are around 30 minutes for mobile orders at this location” on their app they would not only NOT sell those 50 drinks, they’d likely deter more people from ordering on top of that. They don’t care.

It does tell you. At least mine does. I went to order online yesterday and it said 28-30 min prep time. Any other time it's like 3-5 or 7-12 or something fairly low.

It shows on the app, but knowing what we know about people, they ignore it. My app will usually show 9-12 minutes for the store closest to my work in the am, and I order 15-18 minutes ahead to be safe. If I see prep time of more than 15 minutes, I’ll skip it because I know my order will somehow get messed up because it’s busy.

Order: some size Americano with an add shot and light water, sometimes I’ll get a larger cup if I know that light water to the store is almost regular, but occasionally, it really gets screwy and I get light water for the next cup size.

Favorite order: Sumatra or a SE Asia Reserve like Da Nang, but not a lot of stores have clovers 🥲

Not enough staffing for red cup day, turning off mobiles was out of the question presumably, customers got pissed waiting so long and were running late for work due to being behind 30-40 minutes on mobiles. But hey big daddy Starbucks is wondering why customer connection scores and drive times will be shitty for the week.

You get swamped with mobile and your wait time for mobiles goes so high that people say fuck it and ditch it on red cup day this makes sense but I bet your store manager wasn’t thrilled lol

YES, this ^^^

I agree, another reason being when someone will place a mobile order right as they get to the drive thru speaker. Their order comes from the mobile orders printer, not the drive thru printed, and they’re at the very end of the line so we end up having to look up the order on our POS to even see what they got 🙄

Best idea ever was to mark out honey citrus mint permanently.

We had a MOP hand off for exactly this reason. We used a floor divider to stop customers from getting close to the usual handoff counter. The barista would pass and call orders and hand out the cups. It was still chaotic based on the sheer NUMBER of orders the barista was dealing with but at least we didn’t have to deal with stealing (we are by a high school so we get a LOT of theft even on an average day).

It was too busy to even think about it - normally we do though

We had a rotation going where we were keeping drinks that were an hour old behind the counter. If they came back or weren’t listening in cafe they were there. Then when the next hour hit we would dump them and clear any hour old drinks from our mobiles handoff. It was a constant cycle lol

We were, but we were so busy we were about 30 mins behind on mobiles and people just opted to leave

[removed]

Would you want a coffee that’s been sitting out for an hour? Even free that’s gross lol. These were abandoned mobiles so it wasn’t like drive where we know for sure immediately that the intended customer wouldn’t want it

Lol why you on this Reddit then…? 🧐

…banned because they didn’t want to wait 30 minutes for their drink? your anger is misdirected

It’s not like these customers spent $6-9 on a drink, purposefully, just to abandon it my friend. Wait times at my store were over 15-20 minutes, both in drive through and cafe, from open until close.

This is 100% labor, staffing, and upper management issues. Multiple customers abandoned their drinks because we’re in a busy medical area and had plenty of students/nurses/etc running late for work.