Mike Hohnen

Starbucks Speed. How to serve drinks — and food — faster without making customers feel like “they’re in an Indy-500 pit stop,” is a key challenge facing Starbucks, reports Steven Gray in The Wall Street Journal. “This is a game of seconds,” says Silvia Peterson, Starbucks’s director of store operations, whose job it is to find ways to play that game better. It’s easy to understand why Starbucks hired her: According to Mintel International Group, mintel.com, “64 percent of Americans said they pick a restaurant based on how much time they have.” That’s why Silvia and “her team of 10 engineers” came up with bigger ice scoops, for example. That way, baristas only had to dip once for ice, helping to “cut 14 seconds off the average preparation time for blended beverages of about one minute.”

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