Ask me about Starbucks - Page 27

ClassicBob · #**261** 08-01-2007, 10:08 AM

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Do the pastries come frozen and you thaw them out or do them come ready to go baked at an off site location in your city?

Also, if you know anything about starbucks profit margin, what kind of margin do they get on pastry? on regular coffee? on specialty coffee?

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1) Baked and ready to go.
2) There are some stores that lose money on pastries, but keep them anyway. As far as actual numbers, I'm not going to be able to help you there. Same goes for the coffee numbers. Typically, we are not going to lose money on the coffee we brew in a day. Coffee is kinda cheap, and if we sell one tall cup, we probably just paid for that particular pot. We do brew hourly, and there our times (especially with decaf, and the secondary coffee) where we will dump an entire urn of coffee without ever having poured a cup from it.

As far as whole bean goes, we do eventually get rid of the bags out in the retail area if they aren't sold. Just like anything else, they do have an expiration date, and I'd check it if I were you before buying at the store. It's not going to make you sick, but it will change the coffee's flavor.

traz · #**262** 08-01-2007, 10:11 AM

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[ QUOTE ]
Do the pastries come frozen and you thaw them out or do them come ready to go baked at an off site location in your city?

Also, if you know anything about starbucks profit margin, what kind of margin do they get on pastry? on regular coffee? on specialty coffee?

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1) Baked and ready to go.

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At the Safeway Starbucks they come frozen and are defrosted the night before, just thought I'd throw that in

ClassicBob · #**263** 08-01-2007, 10:17 AM

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CB, cool thread. Read it but might have missed some questions. In any case...

How well do iced drinks or basically the sweet/milkshake drinks sell in the winter vs. the summer?

What would you say the average fitness level is of someone who eats the food at Starbucks?

How annoying is it when you have to have stuff like McCartney's latest on constant loop?

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1) Cold stuff sells much higher during the summer, obv. A big component of this is kids who are out of school for the summer. High school kids often want to be hip, and hang out out at a coffeehouse, or some [censored]. So they come to Starbucks and get the least coffee-like drink they can get. I hate high school kids.

2) About the same as the average fitness level of America.

3) We actually do have some decent music, and we have the ability to change the music to listen to what we want (of what is available). We are playing the new Wilco album, we play Feist all the time, and we sometimes play random cuts by artists like Beck, RJD2, Gorillaz, etc. It can get annoying, but it's not too bad.

However, I did have to work an 8 hour shift on the day of our Paul McCartney "Global Listening Event." We couldn't change the music on that day. That album [censored] sucks.

spamhead · #**264** 08-01-2007, 10:17 AM

I bet they come from some type of central factory outside of the city and are packaged like something you would get from Sam's club, opened by the store, and put out for display. amirite? Do you know if they are baked every day?

The reason i ask is becasue I own a bakery and we bake our stuff everyday >>>> starbucks pastry.

traz · #**265** 08-01-2007, 10:20 AM

We had pastry orders come about once a week or twice a week depending on the pastry. They would come packaged like something you might buy at costco. We would take pastries out each night, let them defrost, and then the next morning put them in the display case.

In our case, they were definitely not freshly baked, as some end up sitting in our freezer for a week or a little more.

ClassicBob · #**266** 08-01-2007, 10:24 AM

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I bet they come from some type of central factory outside of the city and are packaged like something you would get from Sam's club, opened by the store, and put out for display. amirite? Do you know if they are baked every day?

The reason i ask is becasue I own a bakery and we bake our stuff everyday >>>> starbucks pastry.

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This is pretty much correct. Our breakfast pastries, sandwiches and salads are baked/prepared daily, and delivered to our store overnight. When we arrive in the morning, we put them out for display. All the breakfast style pastries are supposed to be pulled no later than 2 p.m. However, some of the afternoon/evening pastries have a longer keep date, so some of those aren't 'baked daily'.

ClassicBob · #**267** 08-01-2007, 10:25 AM

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We had pastry orders come about once a week or twice a week depending on the pastry. They would come packaged like something you might buy at costco. We would take pastries out each night, let them defrost, and then the next morning put them in the display case.

In our case, they were definitely not freshly baked, as some end up sitting in our freezer for a week or a little more.

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Pastries at an actual Starbucks location aren't frozen, fwiw.

traz · #**268** 08-01-2007, 10:29 AM

werd, we got alot of complaints about our pastry section

ChipWrecked · #**269** 08-01-2007, 10:36 AM

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Baked and ready to go.

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This could describe a lot of 2p2ers as well.

*rim shot*

RacersEdge · #**270** 08-01-2007, 11:18 AM

Good thread - nice job CBob.

Here's a minor complaint about SB: I like the environment of most SBs, but in almot every one the employees always seem to be carrying on fairly loud conversations with each other - usually just chit chat. It kind of takes away from the whole environemnt they have going in these places. The workers are obviously trained pretty well in other areas - don't they have rules on chatter?