There are a bazillion possible Starbucks orders and it's killing the company

The coffee chain is not alone in struggling with the complexity that comes from too many choices.

- Bill Saporito

You're already in line at Starbucks - having failed to order by app when you spot one of them. That dude who is looking down not at a cellphone but at the Post-it note that holds the orders of his office mates. Which is confirming that you are going to be late for that next meeting, because this person plans to order six coffee beverages, each of which involves some combination of tall venti grande double-pump, one to four shots of espresso, half-caf, oat milk, nonfat milk, soya milk, milk milk, whipped cream, syrup, brown sugar, white sugar, no sugar and mocha drizzle, from the pike position with two and a half twists.

Even ordering via app has issues. There's often a crowd waiting at the bar end because Gen Z, which tends to prefer anything but human interface, has overwhelmed the baristas with the same orders-ofmagnitude drinks.

Starbucks says there are more than 170,000 possible drink combinations available, but outside estimates have put the number at more than 300 billion.

And the person in front of you always seems to be ordering 100 million of them.

If the degree of difficulty in a typical Starbucks order now seems to be Olympian, so are its troubles.

The Seattle-based company has become the Boeing of coffee bars.

So much so that, like the airframe maker, Starbucks has jettisoned its chief executive, Mr Laxman Narasimhan, and replaced him with Mr Brian Niccol, who until recently was the CEO of the Chipotle Tex-Mexish food chain.

Although Mr Niccol's appointment drove up Starbucks's stock price, the two companies sometimes have the same problem: too many choices and not enough staff, which at peak times is almost certain to deliver disappointment as much as it does burritos or lattes.