Is every company that talks about being ‘customer-obsessed’ lying?

Is every company that talks about being ‘customer-obsessed’ lying?

Starbucks just announced they’re closing hundreds of stores and laying off 900+ workers as part of their “$1 billion restructuring plan.” Their CEO calls it getting “Back to Starbucks.”

Let me translate that corporate BS for you: We prioritized growth over everything else for years, opened stores everywhere to hit Wall Street numbers, and now we’re shocked that they don’t work.

Here’s what really happened: Starbucks chased revenue growth like an addict. They crammed stores into every strip mall and street corner without asking if customers actually wanted them there. They optimized for quarterly reports instead of daily experience.

Now they’re discovering that some locations “don’t see a path to financial performance” or can’t “create the physical environment our customers and partners expect.”

I’m sitting in my local Starbucks (closing tomorrow) and I think the environment is excellent!

Translation: We built stores without thinking about whether they’d actually work long-term.

The uncomfortable truth:

Most companies confuse customer acquisition with customer care. Starbucks got addicted to new stores instead of making existing ones worth visiting. They confused footprint with loyalty.

Real customer experience isn’t about having 18,000+ locations. It’s about making the ones you have so good that people drive past three competitors to get there.

Here’s what pisses me off: This is the second round of layoffs this year. They cut 1,100 corporate workers in February. But I guarantee the executives who made these expansion decisions kept their jobs and bonuses.

The lesson nobody wants to hear:

Stop optimizing for growth metrics that impress investors and start optimizing for experiences that create fanatics. When your “customer experience strategy” includes mass layoffs, you never had a customer experience strategy. You had a revenue addiction.

The employees getting laid off aren’t the ones who decided to open unprofitable stores. But they’re paying the price.

Here’s a “better fix (that nobody will implement):

Stop opening anything new until existing locations are profitable and beloved.

Fire the executives who approved unprofitable expansion (grocery store locations are lame!)

Ask frontline employees what’s broken instead of paying McKinsey $10 million.

Measure customer loyalty, not customer acquisition.

Regardless of what happens, this is major FU to loyal employees and loyal customers everywhere.

P.S. Ten years ago I wrote in my book Evergreen “slow the focus on growth and focus on value.” Still true today.

What’s your take? Are mass closures really about “customer experience” or just fixing years of bad decisions?

#starbucks #linkedinnews