From our friends at Reveries.com
Lean Caffeine
Wed, 08/05/2009 by Tim Manners

Scott Heydon and his “lean team” use a Mr. Potato Head toy to help Starbucks employees understand exactly how inefficient they are at their jobs, reports Julie Jargon in the Wall Street Journal (8/4/09). The toy’s parts are sprinkled “across several tables” and baristas are timed by stopwatch to see how long it takes them to put Mr. Potato head together. The first time Tara Jordan tried this, it took her about a minute. But she got her time down to just 16 seconds after “moving items closer together” and “altering the order of assembly.” This exercise is part of Starbucks’s drive to reduce its store labor costs, which total “about $2.5 billion, or 24 percent of revenue, annually.”

Scott Heydon hopes the “lean team” initiative isn’t just about cost-cutting though, that making Starbucks employees more efficient will also make them more effective — freeing up more time “to interact with customers and improve the Starbucks experience,” for instance. It’s an especially tricky endeavor for Starbucks because “every store is configured differently and has its own customer-traffic patterns.” The Mr. Potato Head game is intended to encourage employees “to come up with their own solutions.”

As a result, at some stores, “bins of beans are now kept on top of the counter so the baristas don’t have to bend over; bins are color-coded so they can find a particular roast without having to pause and read the label.” Some baristas object: “They want to control our every move in order to pinch every penny,” says Erik Forman, a Minneapolis barista. But some stores are seeing improvements in customer-satisfaction scores and Starbucks figures that serving customers faster “can boost traffic because that keeps people from leaving stores.” However, Jeffrey Bernstein, an industry analyst thinks the concept has its limits: “Those efficiencies only help when people come in the door,” he says.