The real reason Starbucks is bringing back self-serve milk and sugar

Starbucks customized drinks overwhelmed workers. Now it wants you to add your own sugar and milk

Starbucks baristas can put eight shots of espresso into one cup. They can make drinks that taste like strawberries, apple pie, pumpkin spice or, separately, pumpkin cream. But they can’t get Amanda Poore’s coffee order right. “I usually like about a half-ounce of creamer or less. That can be kind of difficult to communicate to the baristas,” she said. “There are several Starbucks I straight up don’t go to because they put in way too much creamer.” For years, Poore made her decaf iced espresso just the way she liked it, with no issues at all, at Starbucks in Seattle. Starbucks’ self-serve stations had milk, sugar, sweeteners, spices and stirrers, just like at other coffee shops. But the company locked away the milk and sugars early in the Covid-19 pandemic over fears that the virus could spread on surfaces, and never added them back. Starbucks had also struggled with milk waste at the stations and theft in some cases, according to workers. Instead, Starbucks left the task of splashing the perfect amount of milk, sugar and other add-ons to overstretched baristas racing to prepare the sort of elaborate drinks that the company has become known for – and that have become viral on TikTok – for several customers at once. But Starbucks will bring back self-serve stations in all of its stores by early next year, a relief for customers like Poore. “Now I don’t have to worry about bothering the baristas if they put too much in,” she said.