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Starbucks recently advanced its turnaround efforts by introducing ordering kiosks, scheduled app orders, and a restructured licensed-store model focused on segments like travel and healthcare, alongside its GROW program to improve coffeehouse performance.
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These operational changes, combined with investments in staffing and new for-here coffeehouse formats, highlight Starbucks’ push to address service bottlenecks and labor challenges while refining how it supports high-traffic licensed locations.
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Now we’ll examine how Starbucks’ licensed-store restructuring and new ordering technologies may influence the company’s existing investment narrative and risk balance.
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To own Starbucks today, you need to believe its Back to Starbucks turnaround and new store formats can translate operational fixes into healthier margins over time. The near term catalyst remains evidence that these changes can stabilize earnings after recent margin pressure. The biggest risk still centers on labor and input costs compressing profitability. The latest kiosk and app initiatives look incremental rather than game changing to that risk reward balance, at least for now.
The most relevant announcement here is Starbucks’ test of ordering kiosks and scheduled app orders in high traffic licensed locations like airports. This ties directly to the catalyst around improving throughput and service quality, especially where long lines and labor strain are most visible. If these tests meaningfully ease bottlenecks for licensees while supporting the GROW program in company stores, they could strengthen the case that operational streamlining can eventually relieve margin pressure.
Yet behind the technology push, investors should be aware that rising labor costs and ongoing labor disputes could still…
Read the full narrative on Starbucks (it’s free!)
Starbucks’ narrative projects $45.5 billion revenue and $4.6 billion earnings by 2028. This requires 7.5% yearly revenue growth and an earnings increase of about $2.0 billion from $2.6 billion today.
Uncover how Starbucks’ forecasts yield a $99.94 fair value, a 15% upside to its current price.
Compared with the consensus view, the lowest analysts are far more cautious, even with Starbucks targeting about US$42.7 billion of revenue and US$4.1 billion of earnings by 2028, and these new ordering tests could either reinforce or challenge that more pessimistic stance as the story unfolds.