Starbucks after years of cutting is going to staff w more baristas?

Starbucks has cut it's staff per store from about 27 to 19.8 since 2022. OMG it's a sweat shop in there. They have five year olds roasting coffee beans.

Thank god somebody is doing something!

Starbucks goes all in on human baristas after years of slashing the size of its workforce

Chart R

What makes a good barista? Extensive coffee knowledge? Intricate latte art? Spelling your name correctly?

According to Starbucks’ first ever global barista champion, Japan’s Nobuki — who beat 84,000 other contenders as he was crowned at the company’s Leadership Experience event in Las Vegas on Wednesday — the first step is a “sparkling smile.”

CEO Brian Niccol would agree. His plight to turn around the flagging company by hiring more in-store employees is centered on a bet that Starbucks is missing a human touch. The ex-Chipotle chief told the Financial Times, “We over-rotated on the idea of equipment and that replacing the humanity of service, and I think service is our point of difference.”

Ex (coffee) machina

Since taking the helm in September, Niccol has been heading a customer-service-focused “Back to Starbucks” strategy to return the world’s largest coffee chain to its coffeehouse roots.

On Tuesday, he told Reuters that Starbucks is accelerating the rollout of its new “Green Apron” service model to all North American stores by the end of summer — announcing to the ~14,000 store managers at the Vegas event that “the biggest human capital investment in connection in the history of Starbucks is about to happen.” For many Starbucks workers, this can’t come soon enough.

Since 2022, the company has slashed its workforce, moving toward automated equipment for efficiency. Based on our calculations, the company had an average of 26.8 employees per US company-operated Starbucks store at the time. By the end of fiscal year 2024, that figure fell to 19.8.

But now, Starbucks is doing a U-turn on automation, having halted the use of its high-tech systems in April. Though analysts have raised concerns about the cost of the in-person push, baristas at high-footfall branches will be buzzed: a Bloomberg survey last year found that only one-third of US Starbucks workers said stores were consistently well staffed.

Read this on the web instead

Yahoo is still one of the most visited websites on the planet

Internet brands don’t tend to live very long.

Myspace, Vine, Flickr, BuzzFeed, Napster, Bebo, Vice, Tumblr, and many more have exploded onto the scene before either fading into obscurity, becoming obsolete, or imploding altogether — and those are just a few of the ones you’ve heard of. Thousands more never made it beyond a domain registration and a traffic-less website.

It’s remarkable, then, that Yahoo — one of the earliest mainstream internet brands — is still alive and kicking at the ripe old age of 31, with the private-equity-owned brand this week announcing a new “catch up” feature to its email service, Yahoo Mail.

In terms of features, it’s not exactly revolutionary stuff: AI-powered summaries of your emails that give you the option to delete or keep the messages hardly represent an innovative breakthrough in digital communications. Even the marketing, which includes a collaboration with a streetwear brand to create a range of “Anti Email Email Club” tees and sweatshirts, feels very 2010s.

But for all the criticisms you could throw at an internet dinosaur like Yahoo, it’s hard to deny its continued longevity. Its email service reportedly still has over 200 million users, and data from Similarweb shows that Yahoo.com is still the sixth-most-visited website in America.