Starbucks Reinvention Strategy: Store Automation and Growth

In September 2022, Schultz presented Starbucks' new Reinvention strategy at the company's investor day in Seattle (U.S.). He claimed that the Reinvention strategy plan addressed the key issues the company faced, as follows: resolving the growing tensions with its U.S. workers, adjusting its value proposition to the shifts in consumer preferences, deploying more store automation, and reactivating its global expansion, primarily in China. During the pandemic, Starbucks was acknowledged as having successfully moved customers away from in-store experiences to drive-through and mobile orders, but now, analysts agreed that the coffee giant needed a bold overhaul. Schultz had previously announced he would be stepping down as interim CEO, after having named Laxman Narasimhan as his successor. This case examines the history of Starbucks since its foundation as a coffeehouse chain in 1987. It examines its business model and the challenges it faced when it explosively grew in the following decades-in particular the circumstances surrounding Schutlz's first return as CEO in 2008, when he first announced that the company had "lost its way" and the challenges the company was facing as it entered the 2020s, after tackling the effects of the COVID pandemic on the restaurant business. The case finishes by examining Schultz's proposed "Reinvention" strategy before putting forward several questions, as follows: Have the key challenges of Starbucks been properly identified? If this was the case, was the Reinvention strategy pushing the right levers to tackle them? How would the workforce react to further automation and digitalization of the stores? And would all of this be enough to entice new consumers seeking a very different experience from the one that had traditionally been offered by Starbucks?