We’re very happy to point out that two of your most popular ideas have been put “Under Review” this week. Here they are:

DARK ROAST, ALL DAY, EVERY DAY! Bold coffee lovers, we hear you. In just three short weeks, your idea has rocketed to the number two spot (remember that popularity is based on a combination of votes and time on the site—less time with more votes equals more popularity). Dkrst, your efforts to lobby the group have paid off.

A Penny to Fight PKD This was one of the first ideas on the site to get real traffic and in more than six weeks, it’s held its place in the top five. So thanks to Sandra Andersen’s amazing generosity, a score of 26,860 and your 599 comments, it made it into review.

Greetings Partners and Customers. There has been a lot of discussion about our dress code—certainly on the partner site, but also on the customer site. We wanted to let you all know that this idea is officially “under review”. This includes a host of ideas on the partner site from posts about tattoos to “Casual Fridays”. Stay tuned for updates!

Just a quick post to the hundreds of you that have participated in the “great conversations” idea. We’ve put together a cross functional team over here to figure out how to put this idea in action—and we’ll likely be asking you some questions in the comment stream to get more of your thoughts. So be on the look out for those. We’re excited about this idea and how it could come to life. Thanks for all of your great input on this one!

I love this idea that was posted by Twyloo a couple of weeks ago: Re-invent British "afternoon tea" - Starbucks style. It’s got me dreaming of warm scones, strawberry jam and clotted cream. What do you think, tea drinkers?

Many of you have commented on the idea called “The Road Trip” and you’ve probably noticed that we’ve put it Under Review. I wanted to let you know that we actually have a similar feature on Starbucks.com. If you go to our Store Locator and click on the “Find Route” tab you can check it out. (You’ll have to use IE or Firefox. Sorry Safari users!)

It is a handy tool for road tripping. Take a look and let us know what you think (add your comments to “The Road Trip” so we’ll be able to find them). And rest assured, we are looking into this idea.

Hi, I’m Denny and I lead the food team here at Starbucks. There have been many, many ideas surrounding healthy food options on the site—Healthy, High Protein Breakfast, Smaller Portion Sizes, More Whole Grains to name just a few. I want to let you know that not only do we hear you, we agree and we’re working on it.

So what are we doing? We’re focusing in on creating delicious—truly delicious—high quality, affordable foods that deliver positive nutritional value and help people get a great start to their day. Eating healthy can be far more than the absence of guilt, it can and should provide pleasure. We're working to bridge that gap.

Our mission at Starbucks is to nurture and inspire and I can think of no better way to do that than to provide the nutrition one needs in the morning to be at their best the whole day. By providing that great start, we can make the difference in the lives of millions every week. It's a lofty goal, (the older I get, the loftier I like my goals to be) and we’re going to make it happen. So stay tuned, because healthy and delicious is on its way.

Just a quick post today… we wanted to let you know that we’re working on revamping our Ideas in Action blog so that you’ll be able to post comments to it. It’s true. A two-way blog will be coming soon.

Thanks for your patience. We’re looking forward to reading your comments.

The summer months are fast approaching. To get in the spirit, we thought we’d share a few “summer sleeper” ideas. Please let us know what you think.

Awesome Summer Pickup
from elwarren

New Summer Drink!!
from emmchugh

Peaches and Cream
From Frizzer

Some of you may not know this, but we also have a My Starbucks Idea expressly for our partners (employees). It’s their place to share ideas and discuss the things that matter most to them—both around the partner experience and customer experience.

Unfortunately, we don’t yet have an Ideas in Action blog just for partners (although we’re feverishly working on it!). But we definitely wanted to recognize the tremendous contributions and participation we’ve seen from our partners by featuring some of their great ideas here…

So here they are—some of the ideas “Under Review” from the partner site:

• A 24-Hour Store In Naperville, IL
• Dress Code Changes
• Electronic Pay Stubs
• Different options for the partner markout (a partner perk which currently is a pound of coffee per week) including the ability to donate coffee to charity
• A high quality coffee container
• Increase the 10 cent personal cup discount
• A marking on hot cups indicating for "room for cream"
• The return of Valencia syrup
• Soy-based Frappuccino® blended beverages
• Starbucks facts printed on our cups

Partners: thank you, and please keep those ideas and comments coming!

My name is Kristi and I work in Retail Implementation & Planning, supporting projects for Store Operations. Recently, many of you proposed a great idea … to reduce the number of printed receipts in our stores. I’m happy to say, an initiative to address this concern was implemented in all U.S. and Canadian stores at the end of March 2008.

Based on feedback from our customers and employees, we eliminated the automated printing of receipts for amounts under $25 in our stores. Now, if a transaction is $25 or less, our baristas will ask customers if they want a receipt and simply hit a button on the register indicating “yes” or “no” based on the response.

We hope by revising this process, we make your visit more convenient and pleasant. Not only will our transactions be quicker and overhead costs lower, we will reduce our waste as well.

Thank you for continuing to tell us your ideas to improve the customer experience and our environment. It’s a great win for all!

It’s been just about one month (tomorrow is our official anniversary) and what a ride! I know we say this a lot, but we are really thrilled with the participation of this community—the ideas and conversations you’ve created are awesome.

So, given that we’re celebrating, we thought we’d give you a quick look at the fruits of your labor to date. Below is a list of 20 ideas that are either “Under Review” or “Coming Soon.” A few quick things to note:

1. This is NOT comprehensive. There are more ideas that are “Under Review” or “Coming Soon.”
2. Not all of the ideas that are “Coming Soon” are exactly what you asked for. Some are ideas we already had in the works and some are adaptations of your ideas.
3. “Under Review” means we’re taking a closer look at whether the idea is a good fit and if so, how we might put it into action.

Option to not print Receipts

Complimentary Wi-Fi

The Road Trip

Great Conversations at Starbucks

Starbucks Facts on Cups

Punch card system

Coffee Ice Cubes

Dark Chocolate Mocha

Flavored Foam

More Sugar Free Syrups & Sauces (more than 180 posted ideas for this!)

Increased Personal Cup Discount

Healthy, High Protein Breakfast

Smaller Portion Sizes

More Whole Grains

Gluten Free Options (almost 150 posted ideas for this!)

Vegan Options (almost 75 posted ideas for this!)

Electronic Sign showing Song Now Playing

Birthday Brew

Name Tag / Sewn Apron (almost 50 posted ideas for this!)

Encourage commuter & in-house mugs (More than 200 posted ideas for this!)

Hi, I'm Meg, and I work on the Brewed Coffee team. I feel proud to have been a part of the Pike Place Roast launch, and I enjoy reading your comments about it. Exciting as this launch has been, I'm even more excited to think about what's next for brewed coffee at Starbucks.

In addition to some of the things we're thinking about for the future (which I'll have to keep a secret for a little while longer), I've seen a lot of great ideas posted here, like the desire for a coffee-only line and standardizing what we mean by "room for cream".

I'm curious to know more about your preferences. Would you rather skip the condiment bar and have the barista add the perfect amount of milk and sugar for you? Do you come in for a Coffee Press and an authentic coffee "experience" or would you like to have self-serve coffee? Perhaps both, depending on the time and day? Ultimately, I want to know how you would like your perfect cup of coffee to be served. I look forward to your comments!

Hello all. I’m Ken Lombard, president of Starbucks Entertainment.

I have been browsing through the music section of My Starbucks Idea and there is a recurring theme I wanted to post a quick blog to discuss.

Many of you have expressed an interest in discovering new music when you are at Starbucks. I have seen this phrased many different ways, including asking for a focus on local music, breaking new artists, or including more indie music in our music selections.

Our content team, (the folks who hand select the CDs we sell in our stores, create all the terrific compilations we offer and choose all of the music played overhead) is committed to helping our customers discover great new music. Whether it’s a new album from a well-known artist or a song from a brand new artist that we think will become your favorite, we discuss discovery every time we sit down to program music.

This week, we are doing something very exciting to further our commitment to fostering music discovery. We call it Pick of the Week and it’s an extension of the Song of the Day promotion we did with iTunes last fall.

Starting April 15 and every Tuesday going forward, more than 6,000 Starbucks locations in the U.S. will offer a new Pick of the Week card redeemable on the iTunes Store for a complimentary song, story or video hand picked by Starbucks Entertainment. Supplies of these new cards will be limited, so drop in early on Tuesdays to check out the latest offering.

Pick of the Week is not a new idea that grew out of this web site, but was something we had been planning for some time. However, I did want to share this cool news with all of you, to see what you thought of it and encourage you to get a Pick of the Week card the next time you are at Starbucks.

Enjoy.

Birthday Brew – How about a free drink on your birthday?
Thanks for the discussion around a complimentary birthday beverage. It would be a fun way to help our customers celebrate their special day. We’ve added “birthday brew” to our list, and are considering it along with several other ideas that you’ve suggested to reward and recognize our regular customers.

Greetings, it’s Brad Stevens again. I keep reading the site and I’m impressed by the passion and enthusiasm many of you have for the different ways you can be rewarded and recognized by Starbucks. We’ve got quite a few great ideas here and we plan to test several of them this summer.

I posted a blog a few weeks ago describing the new Starbucks Card Rewards that would be rolling out soon. Well the day has finally come! All you have to do is register your Starbucks Card and you get to take advantage of offers like select complimentary syrup for espresso beverages, and free brewed coffee refills. Also, if you buy a pound of whole bean coffee in our stores with your Starbucks Card, you’ll get any tall beverage of your choice! We’ve received so many wonderful ideas about how you want to be rewarded. I hope that you’ll agree that receiving rewards “on the spot” is a great way to start.

As I mentioned last time, this is just the beginning of the innovative programs that we will deliver via a registered Starbucks Card. Stay posted and please continue to submit your ideas.

Warm Regards,

Brad Stevens

Many of you have commented on the “drink of the month and giving to charity” idea. We’re so excited about your enthusiasm and are putting this idea “Under Review”. I’ll keep you updated on the status of this one.

In the past we have offered regional beverage promotions with a give-back component. Two examples that were particularly well received included the Starlight Starbright Children’s foundation and Jumpstart Leprechaun Latte program. In each case, we made a donation based on the number of drinks sold in a particular time. This year, we’re doing an Earth Day (April 22 ) promotion at all Starbucks stores in the US and Canada. If you use your Starbucks Card to pay for any purchase (whether it is a pound of coffee, a reusable coffee mug, or a double tall Caramel Macchiato) we’ll donate a nickel to Conservation International. (Think about all of our customers across the US and Canada, and what an impact this can make!) The donation will go towards promoting a more stable climate by planting trees in Chiapas, Mexico. For more information about CI, go to www.conservation.org.

Everyday your Starbucks purchases are making a difference. Most of our coffee purchasing contracts include a premium to help fund social projects at origin, so for farmers the more coffee Starbucks buys, the more benefit they receive. Some other components of our integrated coffee buying approach include paying the premium prices that high-quality coffee commands and providing access to affordable credit for coffee farmers.

We all want to feel like we’re helping to make a difference in the world and our communities and we’ll continue to look for ways for all of us to give back together. So stay tuned for more news on your “drink of the month and giving to charity” idea.

BE SPLASH-FREE
Thanks for your many ideas and comment about providing something for our lids to minimize coffee splashes. As a result of your feedback about spills out of the sip hole, we have been testing splash sticks in limited markets to gauge customer interest (sounds like some of you have seen them). Based on an overwhelmingly positive customer and partner response, we are rolling out splash sticks nationwide this week. Also, to help minimize waste, you can save your splash stick to be cleaned and reused.

We hope this helps keep your car and clothes a little cleaner on your rush to work; enjoy and let us know what you think.

Hi, I’m Katie and I work on our brewed coffee team. I’m excited to report that our newest coffee, Pike Place Roast, is officially available. So what does this have to do with My Starbucks Idea?

Even before the site launched, we were getting lots of input on our brewed coffee—from surveys, conversations with friends and family, customers in our stores, and, yes, strangers at cocktail parties. On the site, there have been lots of ideas posted surrounding this—talk about “burnt” or “bitter” coffee, freshness and brewed coffee consistency in general. Pike Place Roast is something we were working on that happily addresses both the ideas on the site and the feedback we’d been getting from customers through other venues.

Our challenge was to come up with a single coffee that most people would like—something that you would want to drink every day. We wanted it to have Starbucks’ signature bold taste—because this is what we’re all about and why most of our customers come to us in the first place—but we also wanted it to have a smoother finish. And, of course, we wanted it to be very fresh.

We think Pike Place Roast delivers on these things. It’s Starbucks’ signature taste, but with a smoother finish. It’s a coffee with broad appeal, something that everyone who has tasted seems to like (or at least that’s what they are telling me...). And to ensure that your cup is always fresh, Pike Place Roast will be brewed every 30 minutes, ground fresh throughout the day, and rushed from our roasting plants to stores around the country. Pike Place Roast is also purchased from C.A.F.E. Practices verified suppliers. C.A.F.E. Practices verified coffee is responsibly grown and ethically traded.

So many people have come together to make sure this is the highest-quality cup of coffee—from the farmers to the roasting plants to the store partners who will be brewing each batch to perfection. We hope you’re as excited about this as we are.

Find out more www.starbucks.com/pikeplaceroast

It’s the end of week three for the site and we’ve gotten tons of ideas—more than we ever imagined we’d get in just 20 days! Believe it or not, we go through the site with a fine-toothed comb (and we’re talking thousands upon thousands of ideas here). Sometimes, when we’re combing through the deeper regions, we find an idea that looks pretty interesting even if it isn’t getting much attention. We call these our “Sleepers” and wanted to share a few of them with you to see if you thought they were interesting too.

Posted by "Judy" to Atmosphere and Locations:
I could use a shelf!

Posted by audreym6 to Social Responsibility:
Better incentives for personal mugs

Posted by jbwilks to Other Involvement Ideas:
Condiment Center

We know that there are duplicates of these on the site—and we’re working to solve that problem—so forgive us if we didn’t choose yours. But, that said what do you think?

Hello everyone! Wow, I cannot believe it’s been less than three weeks since we launched and already we have so much in motion. In addition to working on mystarbucksidea.com, I am also part of the Starbucks Food Team, so it really is exciting to see all the passion and great discussions around our food offerings. Thank you for all the energy you’ve put into this community; there’s definitely a lot to talk about when it comes to food and I have to tell you, “we hear you loud and clear!!” While I can’t divulge a lot about what’s happening behind the scenes with food, I can say that it is tremendously exciting and so many wonderful ideas are in the works.

I’m especially inspired to see such great enthusiasm around smaller treat options and bite-size pastries on the website! Personally, I’m right there with you on the petite-sized treat to go with my coffee. Sometimes I just feel like a couple bites and at other times I’m up for a bit more indulgence. For me a splurge usually means a full-sized pastry warmed in the oven, but I would love the option that several have suggested of having 2 or 3 different petite-sized pastries. I was recently at dinner with a larger group and (in the name of research) paid particularly close attention to the habits of my dinner partners as well as other patrons in the restaurant. I noticed that not only my table, but most everyone who ordered dessert, seemed to share amongst themselves – probably to enjoy a few bites of more than one treat.

The Petite Vanilla Bean Scone has been amazingly popular with our customers. Such opportunities are almost endless and we are currently exploring many other ideas for food offerings. So stay tuned and keep the ideas and conversation flowing because we are listening!

Hi, my name is Cory and I’m one of the Idea Partners for Starbucks. I work in store development, the team of people that find great places to open stores, and then design, build and maintain them. I’ve been reading the posts as they come in, and wasn’t surprised to see that there is a lot of passion about seating in our stores. There’s also wide variety in the preferences people have about what they sit on while they’re visiting us.

Despite the impressions some of you have about the shrinking size of our stores, I can vouch for the fact that our average store size has been steadily increasing over the past 15 years, and the stores we opened last year hit an all-time high in average square footage. And yet, while we continue to make more room for our customers, we consistently hear from you that there either isn’t enough seating or the seating options could use some improvement.

The Italian coffeehouse experience that inspired Howard Schultz many years ago is still our “true north” for design. People gathering, lingering, sharing coffee and ideas, and building their sense of community is our ideal vision for each and every Starbucks. And then there’s the reality of twenty-first century life – with jobs, compressed time schedules, business meetings, long commutes, limited family bonding time – customers are looking to include Starbucks in that lifestyle. We like to say “yes” as frequently as possible, which means we have designed stores and seating options to meet a diversity of needs and moods. Many of the ideas you have suggested have already been incorporated into a number of stores: bar seating, cushy couches, small meeting tables, large conference-style tables, hard seats, settees … I see all of these options within 10 miles of my house. I guess that’s one advantage of living in Seattle.

The challenging part is putting in the right mix of seating options to accommodate the way we expect customers in each neighborhood to use the space(here we are, back to the space problem). Sometimes we get it right, and other times we try to adjust the seating to our customers’ needs when we renovate a store. The balancing act of more seating for business and studying versus the living room couch and overstuffed chairs is further complicated by factors such as durability, how easy it is to clean, how flexible a seating option can be, and our desire to make it look really great, too. I know the paralysis I get when shopping for new furniture for my home – it’s just as challenging when we shop for furniture for our stores!

For the past decade or so, we’ve also been dedicated to finding new ways to minimize our environmental footprint. Lighting and energy consumption has been a big focus, and now we’re looking at everything used to build and outfit a store. Furniture and casework is definitely a part of this, so don’t be surprised to see “green” chairs and tables in the stores in the future.

The design studio at our Seattle Support Center area is filled with a mind-boggling variety of color, material and shapes of samples. We have a saying at Starbucks, “every store is a snowflake”. While there are many similarities between our stores, no space is exactly the same and no neighborhood is exactly the same either. We have recently rededicated ourselves to making each store as tailor-fit to its community as possible, which includes every design element.

We hope you like what you see as we make some of our ideas, and yours, come to life.

While working at Starbucks, I’ve supported many projects in the IT world. Automated ordering has gained quite a lot of momentum on the MyStarbucksIdea.com site.

We are always working to find innovative ways to better serve our customers. Through automated ordering we may be able to increase our speed of service and produce a more consistently accurate beverage for our customers.

We have an entire project team dedicated to initiatives like this one. We call the project group “Global Store of the Future” and it’s where ideas like automated ordering are researched by our IT Strategy team. As you can probably guess, these ideas require quite extensive technological infrastructure and to upgrade more than 15,000 stores would be both costly and time-consuming. The question is… Is it worth it?

We once tested a variation of this idea by offering customers the ability to call in their order and the order would be sent to a desired store. The store would receive the drink order at the register. In theory the customer’s drink would then be ready when the customer arrived.

The project was short-lived, because there were issues with timing and accuracy. This process had too many steps.

We’re currently looking at an exciting new option. I can’t reveal exactly where we are with this right now, but you may see it tested in a store near you one day and I’ll keep you updated on progress whenever I can.

The Starbucks Card team is also researching ways to offer loyalty rewards. Again, this idea is on our radar and is currently being researched.

As a company, we want to be innovative and use technology to meet the needs of our customers. Ironically, when tested, technology often does not prove to be faster or more efficient than our current deployment and customer service model.

Most importantly, we love the personal interactions we now have with our customers. Many of the comments on MyStarbucksIdea express regret that personal contact would be taken away if we replaced the barista who takes your order with an automated system. Our culture truly embraces the human connection. This is the premise we built our business upon and intend to keep.

Ultimately, we’ll continue to strive for the right balance between technological advancement and human interaction and are dedicated to making all of our valued customers feel welcome and well served.

Greetings to the mystarbucksidea.com Community,

My name is Major and I’m lucky to have the unique opportunity to work in Global Coffee & Tea Education along with a small handful of other partners. Gauging from the votes and comments, there’s a strong desire to learn more about coffee. Luckily, that’s easy!

Your local store is a fantastic resource. All of our baristas are knowledgeable about a variety of coffees, and while we don’t have a set coffee class program in our stores, you can arrange to have our baristas take you through a guided tasting and help you in your personal coffee journey.

We do coffee tastings regularly here, and I thought I’d share one of my most recent and memorable experiences with you:

My colleague, Christian and I were invited to present a coffee education and tasting session for a group of 200 Foodservice Educators in North Las Vegas. We arranged for 30 local Starbucks baristas to help us.

We wanted to serve three different coffees all freshly made in coffee presses (clearly we needed as much help as we could get!) And the hotel chefs created special food pairings for each coffee—Organic Shade Grown Mexico was paired with a delicious lemon curd tart to enhance the coffee’s citrus notes, new Starbucks® Chocolates matched nicely with Caffé Verona® and mascarpone cheese matched the earthy elements in Sumatra.

Many, many coffee presses were prepared at exactly seven minutes prior to the tasting and three minutes remained to pour 600 samples, ensuring that the coffee was absolutely as fresh as possible. Everyone was set and ready to go.

Anticipating a grand entrance, we all hid behind the doors of the meeting room waiting for the precise moment to start serving. At the perfect moment, the doors flew open and the room was infused with an amazing coffee aroma while waves of green-aproned partners passed the coffee.

It was quite a rush of adrenaline be able to engage with so many people at once over a coffee tasting. For the next half hour we talked about the coffee attributes; how they smelled, how they felt when we sipped them and how they tasted with each food. It was magical and the excitement was contagious.

This may seem like a grandiose way to engage and learn about the geographical coffee flavor nuances, but all over the world, every day, baristas in our stores share this enthusiasm. So ask them. In your next visit, ask what pairs with your favorite coffee and what unique flavor notes to look for. You can even learn how to have your own coffee tasting at home (over brunch with friends) or at the office (as a team meeting ice breaker).

The key is to continue to share your passion and curiosity. Let me know through my mystarbucksidea.com if you have more ideas about classes or tastings and please keep me posted when you have some great experiences with our store partners.

Cheers…..major

I'm Errol Stewart, User Interface Designer for My Starbucks Idea. A lot of people ask what my inspiration was for the visual design of this site. With all modesty in order, it's simply based on our white whole bean coffee bags—available at a Starbucks near you! Enthusiastically arrange the bags around your monitor for a coordinated My Starbucks Idea interactive experience.

You, enlightened readers and loyal customers, are our favorite people. If it wasn't for you, we would have no reason to maintain this site. It's important to us (and to me, personally) that your stay is enjoyable and valuable. I frequently peruse this site, reading your ideas, suggestions, and, dare I say, woes about its performance and functionality—like multiple posts regarding the same idea, difficulty navigating ideas, and speed issues. Rest assured, many of your ideas about My Starbucks Idea itself are already on our development radar, and will be carried out in future revisions.

So check back often and keep those ideas coming. We're paying attention—if only you could see our posture!

The idea to create a separate line for drip coffee customers is one Starbucks has considered. In fact, this concept was tested years ago with favorable results.

I spoke with a store manager who tested a brewed coffee line during his busiest hours of the morning and was able to serve drip coffee customers very quickly. The biggest benefit was that these customers did not have to wait behind those wanting espresso beverages or pastries, which can take a bit of time to process. Customers ordering espresso beverages and pastries were also served more quickly since the drip coffee customers were not in their line.

Another added benefit was for our baristas. Having an extra partner on the sales floor was great. When there were no brewed coffee customers, the barista dedicated to this line could clean or prepare the store for other customer needs.

Unfortunately, the challenge with the drip coffee line is that most of our stores are not designed to make it work. Many customers found the two lines confusing and they didn’t always flow well. Ultimately, the added complexity caused by the two lines was not beneficial enough to make this concept a customer service standard.

The good news is, we continually evaluate the layout of our stores and it’s on our radar to consider designing stores to accommodate two lines. In fact, we are testing a variation of this concept in some of our stores now. The “self service brew station” concept places the coffee brewer near the condiment bar and customers simply serve themselves and pay before or after getting their own drip coffee. It will be interesting to see the feedback and results of this idea as well.

I’m a drip coffee drinker and appreciate getting my beverage quickly on my way to work each day. It’s good to hear from customers who feel the same way. We will forward your comments to the partners who enhance our customer service standards. Thank you for sharing so passionately.

I'm an Idea Partner in Seattle and on the Partner Resources (a.k.a. Human Resources) team. It has been great to see the passionate discussions between our customers and partners on this topic over the past few days. I truly appreciate your honesty and different points of view—it's refreshing! As a partner and loyal customer of Starbucks, I definitely understand both perspectives on this idea. Many of you feel that adding names to faces will facilitate a better connection and make the interactions even more personal. On the other hand, some of you feel that it's too formal, it creates a fast-food feel, it's not necessary, or it's too personal.

Our store partners are the first point of contact for many of our customers. Besides the quality of our coffee drinks and products, it's the service and human connection our partners provide that keep customers coming back. As I reflect on how the human connection is created, I think of many possibilities...a smile, a hello, an acknowledgment, an introduction, an inquiry, a conversation, or a simple "thank you." Also, you may notice that we have a sign in our stores saying, "Your barista is..." This is another way for us to foster that connection. In my view, these types of actions and interactions bring a sense of belonging and the third place to our customers the moment they step in the door.

Could nametags or sewn aprons facilitate the human connection between our partners and customers? Possibly. We tested the nametag idea in the Northeast several years ago. At that time, we decided not to move forward because the feedback was that it created a "fast-food" atmosphere. It's something we’ll continue to evaluate and discuss and we’ll definitely update you if it gets implemented in the future.

Connection is what makes us a different kind of company to our customers. If you have ideas on other ways we can enhance that connection, I encourage you to share them with us! Thanks.

It’s been just one week since launch and the My Starbucks Idea team has been (unimaginably) busy reading and commenting on your ideas. We want to say “thank you!” We’ve gotten so many great ideas and so much enthusiasm surrounding those ideas. It’s pretty amazing.

Also, we’ve received some great questions/comments from some of you that we thought would be good to share with the entire community—so here it goes:

1. What’s with the duplicate ideas? Yes, we’re seeing a lot of these. In some ways that’s a good thing—great minds think alike—but in terms of votes, it’s diluting them. So we just want to remind everyone to take a quick look at the site (via View All Ideas) to see if your idea has been posted by someone else and is already in the top grouping. If it is, vote on it instead of posting a new one, which will help the idea rise to the top.
2. How can I report an offensive posting? Simple. If you see something off color, please shoot us an email at info@mystarbucksidea.com. We’ll take care of it.
3. How can I recognize the Starbucks Idea Partners? You may not have noticed yet, but our Idea Partners have a screen name convention of sbx_ followed by 4 characters. So when you see that screen name, just know that it’s one of us responding.
4. Who is “CustIdea” and why are they commenting so much on their own posts? A little background: before we launched the site, we asked about 400 regular customers for their ideas, just to see what kind of response we’d get. Needless to say, it was huge. We put their favorite ideas and related comments up on the site, before launch, to get the ball rolling—and we posted all of that with the screen name “CustIdea” because we didn’t have screen names or accounts for those would-be users.
5. What does “UNDER REVIEW” mean? You may have noticed that the Punch Card System idea (and others like it) has been marked “UNDER REVIEW”. That means that we are taking that idea to the next level for review by a variety of Starbucks groups. Does it mean we will implement a punch card? Not necessarily. But we’ve heard you and are working to find a way to reward customer loyalty. Keep your eyes on Ideas in Action for updates!

That’s all for now. Thanks again for all of your input and enthusiasm. We really do appreciate it!

The MSI Team

This is Kevin Shawver and I work on the Wi-Fi program at Starbucks. First of all, I am excited to see all the energy around free Wi-Fi—we know it is important to our customers. I was secretly hoping that free Wi-Fi would be #1 amongst the popular ideas, but I’ll take #2.

Back in February we announced that we're switching to AT&T as our Wi-Fi provider in our U.S. company-operated stores. As Brad Stevens mentioned in his post on March 24, we're thrilled to be rolling out two hours of complimentary Wi-Fi service for customers who have a registered Starbucks Card. It'll be simple to sign up. All you have to do is:

1. Register a Starbucks Card
2. Sign up for an AT&T Wi-Fi account (and limited ATT marketing)
3. Come to Starbucks and login

To keep your newly created Wi-Fi account “active” you'll need to make a purchase with your registered Starbucks Card or add additional funds to it within the prior 30 days of logging on. We feel that the complimentary two hours is a meaningful amount of time and a fantastic way to reward Starbucks Card holders.

We have customers with a variety of needs—some want to come in and read, some want to chat with a friend and others want to use Wi-Fi. Starbucks means different things to different people and the two-hour limit helps balance the many needs of our customers so that everyone can enjoy spending time at Starbucks. This service will be available to all customers nationwide later this spring.

I love all the dialogue around Wi-Fi and look forward to hearing more. Look for me in the comment strings…my screen name is sbx_shvr.

Hi everyone. My name is Brad Stevens, and I lead the group at Starbucks thinking about cool ways to reward our customers—and making those rewards a reality.

So, wow! It’s clear that a frequency discount is something that would make a lot of people happy. We’ll explore how this might work as part of the Starbucks Card Rewards program that was announced last week. To date, we’ve been focused on starting with rewards that deliver value to our customers immediately AND daily. We think that providing you with on-the-spot value when you use a registered Starbucks Card is a great way to say “thanks”.

So, starting in mid-April, when you pay with your registered Starbucks Card here’s what you’ll get at participating stores:

• Complimentary customization (add selected syrups or modify your milk – soy or breve), on us. For instance, a Tall Vanilla Soy Latte will be the same price as a regular Tall Caffè Latte. A 70-cent savings in most places.
• Free refills on brewed coffee.
• Tall beverage of your choice with the purchase of 1 lb. whole bean coffee.

And in the near future, we’ll be adding complimentary Wi-Fi access—another hot topic on this site.

It’s great to see all of your ideas and discussion around the Starbucks Card and the different ways we can provide you with meaningful rewards. Please keep your ideas and comments coming! We’re listening, and we’re excited to see how we can evolve our program over time to deliver the best experience for our customers.

Brad

Dear passionate Starbucks Customers:

WOW.

We knew that a lot of our customers had ideas for us. And OK, so we thought that, just maybe, an online community would be a valuable way to get some good ideas, participate in a little bit of conversation with our most passionate customers, and see what the total customer community thought was most important for Starbucks to pursue.

We did not expect this.

What you've done is awesome.

We are completely thrilled at the number of ideas (thousands!). We are stunned by the level of conversation (half of the top 20 ideas have 50 or more comments each -- 50!). We are stoked by the amount of participation (tens of thousands of votes).

When I first announced MyStarbucksIdea on stage at the annual meeting on Wednesday (two days ago), we instantly starting seeing traffic jump in leaps and bounds on the site. At a little after noon, just for curiosity's sake, I counted 10 ideas that were time-stamped in a 2-minute timeframe. We kept refreshing for the next hour and it never dropped off.

So, we want to say this to you: thank you.

Oh, and this: we hear you.

And, finally: we're serious about this community, and we're ready to engage.

By now, if you've gotten into any of the ideas on this site, you've probably seen some comments from our Starbucks Idea Partners (our moderators who are actually experts in their assigned fields -- these people are the real deal -- they are the ones who, on their teams, set the products and experiences in motion in our stores). They all have “sbux_” as the start of their screen name.

They're in here, jumping into conversations with you. And they've already started bringing your ideas -- the ones with the most energy in the community -- to the Starbucks leadership.

Please keep chugging: add more ideas (use search to see if your idea is already out there), vote up the best ideas, and get into the comment stream under ideas you care about.

That's where *we're* living these days -- in the comment stream -- asking questions, replying with information, trying to get underneath what's really important on these ideas. So the best thing you can do is to stay involved.

Wow!

~ Chris

At the core of the Starbucks Experience is human connection. Every week, nearly 50 million customers are connecting with over 170,000 partners (employees) in Starbucks stores around the world—creating an unparalleled sense of community.

This unique Starbucks community has inspired many people to suggest that Starbucks participate in the phenomenon of online communities. Well, now we’re ready to begin.

Welcome to MyStarbucksIdea.com. This is your invitation to help us transform the future of Starbucks with your ideas—and build upon our history of co-creating the Starbucks Experience together.

And just like in our stores, our curious and passionate Starbucks partners are here. Engaging in daily conversation—bringing the warm, human connection of a great Starbucks experience to this online community.

So, pull up a comfortable chair and participate in My Starbucks Idea. We’re here, we’re engaged, and we’re taking it seriously.

This is your place. Let’s see where we can take it together.

Onward!

Howard