The Night Starbucks Closed Nearly 7,100 Stores to Retrain Its Baristas

By Human Business Works

At a Starbucks in New York City, store manager Justin Chapple was pouring espresso into a small shot glass instead of directly into a customer's cup.

The glass made it easier to see whether the shot looked right. If the water moved through the coffee too quickly, the espresso could be weak. If it moved too slowly, the taste could become bitter.

Chapple and the other workers around him had time to pay attention to those details because, for a few hours, there were no customers waiting.

At 5:30 p.m. local time on February 26, 2008, Starbucks closed nearly 7,100 company-operated stores across the United States. More than 135,000 store employees were taking part in a nationwide espresso training session. Stores with evening hours were scheduled to reopen three hours later.

For one evening, a company that had spent years opening coffee shops was deliberately locking thousands of them.

The training focused on basic parts of the job: pulling a good espresso shot, steaming milk correctly and preparing drinks consistently. Starbucks called it a hands-on espresso training experience.

These were not new products.

They were not new machines.

They were skills baristas were already expected to use every day.

That was what made the shutdown unusual.

Only weeks earlier, Howard Schultz had returned to the chief executive role at Starbucks. In a January message to employees, he described a company that had grown from 119 stores when it went public in 1992 to more than 15,000 stores in 43 countries. Starbucks was serving about 50 million customers each week.

But growth had made the company harder to manage.

Schultz told employees that Starbucks had built more infrastructure as it expanded and that bureaucracy had followed. His plan included slowing the pace of new U.S. openings, closing some weaker locations and giving store employees better training and tools.

The February shutdown put that idea into practice in a way customers could see.

At Starbucks stores around the country, people arrived in the evening expecting coffee and found closed doors instead.

Licensed Starbucks locations inside places such as airports, supermarkets and hotels were not part of the shutdown, but most company-operated U.S. stores were closed. Some customers were frustrated. Competitors noticed the opportunity too. Dunkin' Donuts offered discounted espresso drinks while Starbucks employees were inside retraining.

Inside the Starbucks stores, the work was slower than usual.

There was no need to rush an espresso because another customer was waiting behind the first one. There was time to watch the shot. There was time to think about the milk. There was time to repeat a task that normally happened in the middle of a busy shift.

The espresso machines themselves could automate part of the process, but the person operating them still needed to recognize whether the result was right.

That distinction mattered to Starbucks.

A company can standardize equipment, recipes and store layouts. It can write instructions and build systems. But a drink still passes through someone's hands before it reaches the customer.

Multiply that small interaction across thousands of stores and it becomes part of what the company is.

The training evening came at a difficult time.

Starbucks' later financial reporting showed that sales at established U.S. stores fell 5 percent during fiscal 2008, mainly because fewer customers were visiting. By the fourth quarter, comparable U.S. store sales were down 8 percent.

There were problems that three hours of training could never solve.

The U.S. economy was weakening. Starbucks had expanded quickly. Some locations were struggling. Later in 2008, the company would move ahead with major store closures and other changes as part of its turnaround.

But none of those larger problems changed what happened at the counter.

Someone still had to make the drink.

And on February 26, Starbucks decided that the people doing that work should spend an evening practicing it again.

There was something unusually public about the decision.

Businesses retrain employees all the time. Usually, customers never see it happen. Training can take place before opening, after closing or somewhere away from the store.

Starbucks chose a different approach.

It stopped serving customers during normal business hours across almost its entire company-operated U.S. store network.

That meant giving up several hours of ordinary business. It also meant making the training visible to anyone who walked toward a Starbucks door that evening.

The message was difficult to miss: the company thought the work behind the counter needed attention badly enough to stop the counter altogether.

Six weeks after Schultz returned as CEO, Starbucks described the espresso session as part of a broader effort to return attention to coffee and the customer experience.

For the workers inside the stores, however, the evening was much more practical.

Coffee had to be ground correctly.

Espresso had to be watched.

Milk had to be steamed.

The drink had to be made again if it was wrong.

The next morning, customers came back.

Starbucks put a message in stores promising that drinks should be made correctly and that employees would remake them when they were not. The promise appeared immediately after the company had spent an evening asking its workers to look more closely at how those drinks were made.

The larger Starbucks turnaround did not happen that night. It would take longer and involve decisions far beyond the espresso machine.

But for three hours, the scale of the company became strangely small.

Thousands of stores were closed. More than 135,000 workers were inside them. And much of the attention came down to something a customer might never notice when it was done properly: a barista looking at a small shot of espresso and deciding whether it was good enough to serve.