On November 5, Starbucks will open the first Starbucks Pickup store in New York City’s Penn Plaza, designed for Starbucks customers on-the-go. This unique location uses Starbucks Mobile Order & Pay (a feature of the industry-leading Starbucks mobile app) as the primary ordering and payment method for customers. Starbucks Pickup is just one way the company is modernizing and reimagining the customer experience in its stores in high-traffic, metropolitan areas.
Customers who visit this first-of-its-kind location will place and pay for their order using Mobile Order & Pay on the Starbucks mobile app. They will simply select “Starbucks Pickup—Penn Plaza” as their desired location and build their order using the full Starbucks menu. After arriving at Penn Plaza, customers can track the progress of their order on a digital status board and pick up their handcrafted beverage and food items directly from a Starbucks barista.
“Our customers who are on-the-go have told us that connection and convenience are important to them,” says Katie Young, vice president of Urban Markets for Starbucks. “By designing a store specifically for the mobile order occasion, we can deliver both for these customers using the store’s design, location and the expertise of our baristas.”
In designing the Starbucks Pickup location, the company began with a prototype in the Tryer Center, a center for innovation at the Starbucks Support Center in Seattle. At Tryer, teams focused on operations, digital innovation and design worked with store partners (baristas) to create an experience that not only met customer needs but gave store partners the tools they needed to deliver the best customer experience. An early prototype produced a high volume of customer orders but received low marks from baristas due to constrained space and inability to connect with customers. With that feedback, the team immediately start over and landed a store that met both the customer and the partner’s needs.
