After a four-week supply issue, Starbucks once again has enough coffee for students at Emporia State to get their preferred caffeine fix.
“I go a lot before classes that I don’t like to go to mostly,” said Julia Barber, freshman English secondary education major. “And then I’m a little more excited to go to class. It’s like a ‘treat yourself’ thing.”
Barber visits Starbucks about four times a week and was excited to see her drink order back on the menu last Thursday. While Barber said she has not been particularly angry about the supply issue, Starbucks employees like sophomore nursing major Isabella Ford have encountered some frustrated customers the past few weeks.
“There’s been a lot of people that are upset,” Ford said. “And they come in and ask for multiple different things and we don’t have anything. So they just walk out upset. So yeah, it’s been rough.”
Ford said that the supply issue was mostly the fault of delivery employees.
“We placed multiple orders,” Ford said. “They just weren’t coming to us…It wasn’t our fault.”
Sodexo, a multibillion dollar company that runs ESU’s cafeteria and food services, is also in charge of Starbucks. System operations manager for Sodexo, Wesley Brown claims that the reason the coffee shop had been out of items the past month was due to many factors such as third-party vendors, supply-chain issues and Sodexo’s ordering process, done by employees.
“There are a lot of growing pains just with that store in particular,” Brown said. “But I do think that we’re in a better place now than we were in before.”
Brown began his job at ESU about six months ago and has faced many challenges within that time. One of these challenges includes finding a better way to order the items needed to keep orders in stock.
“The biggest issue with it really was just the way that the ordering was going about,” Brown said.
Starbucks employees in the past have used a system in which Brown would hand the employees an order sheet and ask them to mark down what was in stock and what needed ordered. Recently, many of these items were missed.
“There are products that are really just Starbucks specific,” Brown said. “You can’t order them from anywhere other than Starbucks. And that’s where it kind of gets a little bit muddy too is that if you can’t get it from Starbucks, chances are you just can’t get it.”
To find a better way to manage the ordering system, Brown contacted the Starbucks located on Industrial Street. This location said they were also having similar issues, according to Brown. Since then, Brown says the ordering process used by Starbucks on campus has been “abolished” and that Brown will be doing all the ordering from now on.
“If they (students) can just be as patient as possible with that process, it’s getting better,” Brown said. “It’s going to continue to get better. We know that it’s going to happen, and I hope that the students know that as well.”
