Dive Brief:
- Starbucks will add at least one dedicated, full-time assistant store manager to most of its company-owned restaurants starting in the fall, Chief Partner Officer Sara Kelly wrote in a company post Tuesday.
- An assistant manager will provide consistent leadership during operating hours and help run the store, oversee teams and serve customers.
- Adding more assistant managers will help the chain with a critical shortage occurring in store-level leadership. Roughly 20% of the chain’s stores have an assistant store manager, and they often tend to be short-term, Kelly said.
Dive Insight:
Ensuring stores are properly staffed is part of CEO Brian Niccol’s Back to Starbucks plan to improve the overall coffeehouse experience for staff and customers.
The initial phase of this assistant manager plan will roll out across six U.S. company-operated districts in September. The company will gather learnings from these pilots before scaling full-time assistant manager roles to a majority of its stores in 2026. In Canada, the assistant manager expansion will begin in the summer of 2026.
“For many, it will also be a meaningful first step into coffeehouse leadership, supporting Starbucks’ goal to develop talent, support internal career growth, and hire 90% of retail leadership roles from within,” Kelly said.
This move also builds upon the chain’s new Green Apron Service model that it began deploying across 2,000 company-owned locations in the U.S. in May. That model “combines and unifies new service standards and expectations, changes to partner plays and deployment, streamlined routines, and our order sequencing algorithm,” Niccol said during an April earnings call.
Niccol said that the new service model would add more flexibility to its operations in addition to improving peak throughput, capturing demand, boosting the customer experience and growing transactions. The chain has paused its rollout of its Siren Craft System and curtailed the deployment of a cold press and cold brew equipment as it focuses on its new service model, which has “more potential to improve throughput and connection while minimizing future capital expenditures on equipment,” Niccol said.
Starbucks also said this week that it is testing a virtual assistant in 35 stores that will help staff look up recipes, troubleshoot equipment and schedule last-minute callouts. This technology, which can be used on an iPad, is meant to also improve employees productivity and the guest experience.
