The shortage in coffee chain
In a recent announcement, the coffee chain said it was seeing “temporary supply shortages” for items such as oat milk, caramel, matcha, v.v. The Wall Street Journal, citing store baristas, reported items such as cake pops and cup stoppers are in short supply at some stores.
A Starbucks spokeswoman said: “Specific items will vary by market and store, and some stores will experience outages of various items at the same time.” She apologised for any “inconvenience” faced by customers and said it was working with vendors to restock items as soon as possible.”
To ease this situation, Starbucks customers in the US who open the firm’s app are also currently greeted with a message apologising for any shortages: “Due to current supply shortages, some of your favorites may be temporarily out of stock.” Some expressed their disappointment of not being able to buy any favourite drinks in many stores. Some customers on social media have also been complaining about this situation. These are some tweets which were posted recently about this problem:
The causes of shortage
The first reason is supposed to be an increase in the number of customers returning to cafes and restaurants as coronavirus restrictions ease. One staff member wrote that the firm had not anticipated such a significant rise in demand, so they could not respond quickly.
However, in an interview with BBC, the company said in an emailed reply: “The temporary supply shortages occurring in the US on some products is attributable to the supply chain constraints.” The restrictions of travelling domestically and internationally makes Starbucks’s supply being put into a shortage situation. The representative added, there were a number of companies in the US also facing supply chain issues.
Fast food firm Chick-Fil-A, for example, recently said “industry-wide” shortages meant it had had to limit dipping sauces, while Mexican chain Chipotle said it was raising prices across its menu by 4% to pay for wage increases and rising food costs.
To cope with this problem, Starbucks has just applied some discount programs, however, they have not yet announced anything about the plan to end this situation.
Viet Ha
