Has your Starbucks barista been acting especially friendly lately? Here's why.

The coffee chain is looking to reverse a sales slump with new training—and lots of meaningful eye contact

- Heather Haddon

Here’s how a Starbucks visit is supposed to go today: You walk in the door and the barista looks you in the eye, smiles and says, “Welcome to Starbucks.”

They may call you by name, if you're a regular. When your drink is ready—in four minutes or less—the barista’s there again, handing it to you. “Your Caramel Macchiato looks so good, it’s one of my favorites,” they say. Making your way to a comfy chair, you notice a smiley face and “Have a nice day!” scrawled in Sharpie across your cup.

It’s all according to a carefully written script. The world’s largest coffee company is mounting a new effort to choreograph the way its hundreds of thousands of U.S. baristas speak, make drinks and hand off orders, down to the word. They are being coached to read customers’ moods, to choose the right gestures, the correct tone of voice.

“Pause for a second to make eye contact. Don’t rush the moment,” reads the “Thank with eye contact” section of Starbucks’s new training material, a copy of which The Wall Street Journal viewed. Employees should be present with customers, even when multitasking. If there’s a mishap, baristas need to LATTE: Listen, Apologize, Take action, Thank and Ensure satisfaction.

In the director’s seat is Starbucks Chief Executive Brian Niccol. Now a year into his tenure, he is betting the company’s future lies in making its cafes warm and inviting, and he is leaving nothing to chance.

The company has rewritten its training materials. It’s standardizing uniforms, cafe decor and worker mannerisms. It is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to improve its service and ambience. It’s trying to make its interiors warmer and adding hundreds of thousands of chairs, many of which were stripped out during the pandemic. Mobile-order pickup queues are being better sectioned off, an effort to tamp down on crowding and confusion.