Starbucks to Shutdown for Training.

Starbucks is shutting all its stores on February 26th for three hours to train or retrain its employees.

You can read related articles at the following links:

Seattle Times

Starbuck Gossip (Blog)

Marketplace (Audio, story starts at 19:42 mins:secs)

Street Insider

The question will be, is the training well-designed?

Wednesday morning February 27th will give only a partial answer. March, April, and May will be more important. And of course, maybe this has nothing to do with training at all. Maybe it's a store management problem. Maybe the brand is too diluted, no longer special. Maybe competition from Dunkin' Donuts and McDonalds is creating issues, especially as consumers try to save money in these uncertain economic times.

Will the training work? Stay tuned.

Comments

[J. Lockwood]

In response to whether or not the Starbucks training night this spring was a success, I belive that the answer was yes. My tall, decaf, non-fat lattes have never tasted so good! I have sampled them at a variety of locations throughout my city and they were all much improved over the ones I purchased pre-training. More importantly, I have seen a notable increase in personalized service at my neighborhood Starbucks. Again, my take from the frontlines was that it was a success!

[Jennifer Miller]

It has been two months since the Starbucks training. Has the training worked? It's hard to say. It seems the goal of the training was to boost sales. The means to do this was to make a better cup of coffee and provide superior customer service. But is customer service training the way to boost sales? Yes, you are treating the customers you already have, the regulars, better. But how is this training going to attract the new customers that Starbucks needs to grow their business? Without a marketing plan for the training to support, we may never see how successful this training was for Starbucks.