I wrote a blog for Starbucks.co.uk!

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A few weeks ago I was contacted by one of our partners in the UK Support Centre who wondered if I’d be interested in writing a blog for starbucks.co.uk. My first reaction, I’ll be honest, was to kind of flail my arms around a bit in the privacy of my bedroom before trying to regain some composure in order to reply to the email. Me? Writing for the main Starbucks website in the UK? What? It doesn’t matter how long I’ve been with Starbucks or what role I find myself in, sometimes the sheer excitement of what I get up to just takes over and it does take me a little while to bring the Dave craft back down to earth.

The plan was to have an article put out around four days after our initial contact, so I got to work immediately. Armed with a mug of Colombia Narino Supremo and my coffee passport I sat down to write. I’d planned out an article based around coffee tastings, why we do them and how you can do one at home. I was actually nervous at this stage… It was horrific. I’d write a few lines, freak out, delete, and start again.

I got frustrated with my own nervousness in the end and decided to just keep things the same as I do here, by writing the same way that I speak. I managed to get great help from one of the baristas in my store, (@James_Warwick) who took some amazing photos to accompany the article. I double checked the spelling, the grammar, triple checked that everything made sense, and sent it off.

The article didn’t actually “go live” until the following week… but boy, when it did… I have never shared something so fast in my entire life! I tweeted, facebooked, and dragged my laptop around showing everyone who I could pin down just long enough for the them to get the idea of what was going on! I was over the moon.

Click here to see my article on starbucks.co.uk!

I’d like to thank the digital team for giving me the opportunity to write for them. It really was a fun and exciting thing to be a part of, and I loved it!

Chance encounters at Starbucks…

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I was struck by something while working the Saturday morning shift in my store, and this entry started forming in my mind right away. Being a Scotsman living in the south of England, hearing a Scottish accent in the queue is always nice. There’s usually a bit of chatter about us being so far away from home, how long we’ve been here and the fact that some people have been down here for twenty years or more, and their accent is still as strong as ever.

Yesterday I was greeted by one of our regular Scottish customers, and the sound of us both talking made the next customer in line perk up “are you two from Scotland?” “yes…?” “Oh good, is there a Royal Bank down here? I need to find a branch so I can get some money out!” The customer was referring to The Royal Bank of Scotland, who in fact do have a branch here in Southampton. After we directed her to where the branch was she ordered her coffee and as the queue had dropped off we carried on chatting. The regular customer I already knew lived around 30 minutes from where I grew up, and the woman who was only visiting here actually grew up on the same street that my High School was on! She lived there around the same time I studied here and I would have passed by her or her house every school day for six years!

It’s hard to explain what “Scottishness” is to people, as it’s something you can really only notice if you’re from Scotland yourself. I imagine it’s the same as any other nationality. It’s a bond, made up of understanding each others dialects, specific words that perhaps others wouldn’t understand and it’s definitely a specific sense of humour. I’ve been feeling a little homesick recently and being able to grab a few minutes of conversation with these customers went a long way to alleviating that feeling.

The queue picked up again and the customers moved on. They collected their drinks and took a table together and chatted for half an hour or so before moving on. The fragile nature of this connection is what struck me. I hadn’t originally been given that particular shift, and would have missed the entire situation if it hadn’t been changed a few days before. If one of those customers had left five minutes earlier or later they would have missed each other completely. I know I really appreciated it and two customers who popped in for a coffee on their own ended up having company.

Have you ever had a chance encounter at Starbucks? Bumped into someone you hadn’t seen for a while, or shared a coffee with a stranger? I’d love to know!

 

Let’s talk about Spring!

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It’s been over two weeks since I last posted and shared with you all some of the major changes happening here at Starbucks UK. I’d now like to take a closer look at what else has appeared as part of our Spring promotion. We received two new petities in store, a Dark Chocolate and Chilli petite, and a Strawberry Shortcake petitie. Click on the products names to be taken to the Starbucks UK website and to take a look at these wonderful snacks. I have to say my favourite of the two is definitely the Dark Chocolate and Chilli one… it’s just the right amount of spice from the Chilli flakes on top and I’d be embarrassed to say how many of these I’ve eaten since launch!

We also introduced a brand new panini… the Meatball and Mozzarella! This thing is heavenly. I swear… It’s my new favourite lunch item by far. I’m not a huge fan of overly complicated food (read: I’m a fussy eater) so another thing on the menu I can have on my breaks is always welcome.

As usual there was a change to lots of in store signage to reflect the new promotion. Here’s a few of my favourite images that I took just before launch. I love how bright everything looks, our store has a lot of light cream tiles and walls so these posters all really stand out against the background, I’ll be sad when they go!

As always, thank you for stopping by and I hope you enjoyed what you found. If you had to choose just one of our new food items from the lineup – what would it be?

BIG Changes at Starbucks UK!

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Hello all!

It’s been a while since my last update and as you can probably tell the blog has had a bit of a facelift in the meantime too. I’m now officially on WordPress so hopefully updating will be much easier and it’ll be easier for you all to comment and share these posts eventually too. Please bear with me as I work through the kinks and get the site looking super polished.

Tomorrow is a HUGE day for us here at Starbucks UK, we’re launching a few different things that I want to share with you and give you a heads up about before the big day tomorrow.

The first of the two changes to affect your local Starbucks store will be obvious from when you order your drink: we’re going to ask for your name. This has long been a standard in other markets around the world, particularly in the US, and it’s finally making it’s way here. We’ve been trialling this in our store here in Southampton for a few days and I have to say – it’s amazing how quickly we all get to know each other. I’m having a lot of fun introducing myself and getting to know our regular customers on first name terms. Of course if you’d rather not share your name with us that’s okay too.

The second huge change that you’ll notice from Wednesday onwards is that your coffee is going to be stronger. We’ve updated the recipe for all of our espresso based beverages (excluding Americanos) so that when you now order a tall drink, you’ll receive two shots of coffee, a grande will also receive two, and a venti will receive three. This differs from previous recipes in that both tall and venti now have one more shot of coffee than they used to, and it’s at no extra cost to you! I personally LOVE this, as I am strictly an extra shot kind of guy at the moment so to have this become the standard is amazing for me. However, just as with the first change, if you’d prefer we kept things how they used to be just let us know when ordering and we’ll be happy to make your drink the way you want it.

To share all of these changes with our customers we’re inviting everyone to come in to our stores on Wednesday the 14th of March (tomorrow!) and have a tall latte on us. As long as you come in before noon, tell us your name, your coffee will be on us! I’m working tomorrow morning and I’m so excited! The store is going to be super busy but it’s going to be so much fun – I can’t wait to share our new standards with all of our customers, and to get to know you all a bit better too! I love how personal coffee can be for everyone and I’m looking forward to being a part of that experience for everyone who decides to relax in our store.

I’m just going to finish up with a link to our new TV advert regarding our changes and what to expect, I really love this little ad and I think it’s done a great job of letting people know what’s going on. Click here to head over to the Starbucks UK website to see the ad.

How Starbucks changed the way I use Twitter…

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Starbucks and Twitter, two things that I have been passionate about for a long time. At the beginning of last year they were firmly separate entities in my life, and I was not expecting them to collide into one another. Starbucks is what I do, it’s my job, and I love it. Twitter is something I loved, but didn’t quite understand.

My relationship with Twitter was doomed from the outset. I treated my Twitter account almost in the same way as I treated my Facebook, as somewhere to share what I was up to. The main difference being I could update a lot more on Twitter than on Facebook without meeting people in real life and being told (most embarrassingly) that I was flooding their News Feed. As I’m permanently glued to my phone updating one site or another, Twitter seemed like the ideal place for me. I understood hashtags, I fully grasped @replying to people, and I loved that I could follow celebrities and other notable people I found interesting. If that’s all I’d been after I’d have been set, and there would be no basis for this article.

I wanted more. I wanted interaction, conversations and general chatter. I wanted Facebook, but faster, and with the freedom to update more than once every few hours without scathing comments from my peers. My high expectations put me on a cycle of love and indifference to Twitter. I’d try for a week or so (love), and apart from the few courteous @replies from friends who were in the same boat as me there wasn’t much going on, so the bookmark and Android app would begin to gather digital dust (indifference). A few weeks would pass, I’d get fired up about it again, and give it another go (love). Lather, rinse, retweet.

I joined Twitter in October 2009, yet by early 2011 I had yet to get any real use from the service. This all changed when one evening I was trawling the internet and reading up on my employer, Starbucks. I stumbled across a few blogs about Starbucks, and as a result ended up following some of these people on my rather dire Twitter account. I received some @replies from these bloggers, thanking me for following them, and asking “do you like Starbucks?”. Boom. Conversations were born. I love Starbucks, and suddenly here was a whole community of people who all did too, and who were all more than happy to talk about it.

This initial conversation soon grew into lots of other little conversations, #FollowFriday shout outs, and new followers. I am by no means a power Twitter user. I have just over 400 followers and I still remember my excitement at getting to just a quarter of that amount! 

However, something changed the day I started talking about Starbucks on Twitter. I completed the strange Twitter jigsaw puzzle I’d been routinely giving up on for over a year, and it all made perfect sense. Twitter only works if you have something to talk about, something to contribute. I see now that I was blundering around expecting random strangers to give a crap about what I was doing that day. They didn’t know me! Why should they care? It was the real world equivalent of stopping people on the street and telling them you had just had a lovely meal after a bad day at work.

I started tweeting about Starbucks more often. Getting involved in the latest news stories, updating customers and other partners (employees of Starbucks are called partners) about the goings on of Starbucks UK. Eventually I decided that tweeting about Starbucks was how I can get the most enjoyment out of Twitter. I was ecstatic to finally be getting what I wanted from the service. I changed my username to “StarbucksDave” and officially put myself on the line. The account is not an official Starbucks account, and is no way endorsed by my employers, but with a username like that I wondered if maybe I was making a rod for my own back, limiting myself to what I can and cannot tweet about, for fear of professional repercussions.

I’m happy to say that I did not end up making a rod for my own back, it turns out its easy not to ruin your professional career when tweeting about work – when you genuinely love the job that you do. Not only does it give me the chance to share some information with Starbucks fans around the world, it gives my friends and family the chance for us to talk about something other than my job.

Starbucks definitely changed the way I use Twitter… but more importantly, Starbucks is the reason that I understand, enjoy, and get the most from Twitter.

My day at the UK headquarters!

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On Friday I got to visit our UK headquarters and spend a day with the partners who work there! I was so nervous but so looking forward to meeting everyone and seeing what they do, not to mention finally putting some names to faces of partners I’ve interacted with on Twitter over the last year.

I had to wake up at 4:30am to catch my train to London, my original travel plans would have involved me changing trains twice but due to my (sometimes) brilliant habit of being early for everything I managed to catch a train that was pretty direct and allowed me to cut my travelling time down somewhat which meant I was in London bright and early at 8am. I wasn’t meeting up with my contact in the customer care team until 9am so I decided to walk to the headquarters and then go and do some exploring around the area of Chiswick. I must have looked so strange, I had no idea where I was going and was using my phone as a kind of sat nav and following it’s directions… again, my earliness meant I made it to the entrance of the support centre about fifteen minutes later. With my Starbucks Card in my pocket I decided to set off to find the nearest store, I knew there was a store inside the business park itself but I wanted to see as many as I could so I made my way down Chiswick High Street until I came across a lovely little single level store that had a seperate play area for children inside and some amazing outside seating.

I grabbed a coffee and decided to start heading back to the support centre, however, despite being in a straight line… I managed to get myself good and lost and had to break out my phone again and get directions so that I wasn’t late. I personally found this hilarious as I’m sure some of you saw from my Tweets on Friday morning, I love exploring new places and getting lost is just part of the fun.

I made it to the support centre and made my way to the reception where they had a copy of Onward sitting on the table in the waiting area that I naturally had to have a look through despite seeing every page at least three times before. My contact in the customer care team soon arrived to take me upstairs to the main offices and there was hugging and it was so good to finally meet up with someone who I’ve been emailing and chatting to on the phone for months.

I had a lovely tour of the office where I passed by some offices of our senior management team, where I saw Kris Engskov busy in a meeting and managed to have a few words with my former Regional Director and see various different teams in action.

We then sat down and the real work began, I listened in to some partners dealing with customers queries and responding to customers emails, saw first hand the amazing and valuable work that the customer care team do with a passion that equals the passion of us partners in store. What I really noted is the extra hurdle they have with their contact with customers, here in stores we can chat to you face to face and try to resolve your issue immediately if we can, however the partners in customer care have to manage to get the same outcome but only through interacting over the phone or by email. I was truly impressed and thankful that there’s such an enthusiastic and helpful team that our customers can contact if they have any issues.

I also spent a bit of time with some of the people who work on our Facebook and Twitter profiles… which was amazing. For a complete Twitter fanatic like myself I was completely in my element spending some time with those partners, they let me pick their brains and see what they’re up to, which was really insightful and just downright cool.

When I knew I was going to be going on this visit I wondered what the office would be like… I’ve worked in a few call centers and other corporate style offices in my time and that image fitting in with Starbucks didn’t seem too appealing to me. It’s not old school corporate, it’s a fun place where people work hard. I liked how well it reflected the stores, because I see the same of our work as front line partners, we have fun while we’re working, but we’re working hard. 

I’d just like to say I had an absolute blast on my day in London. A huge thank you to everyone in the offices who spent time with me and showed me what they were up to – I really learned a lot and while it’s fun I’m not sure it’ll ever not be weird to hear people addressing me as Starbucks Dave, haha!

Starbucks Dave joins the 5 Awesome Baristas!

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AHHHHH! This is such an exciting entry to write for you all! On January 25th Taylor James from the Five Awesome Baristas YouTube channel contacted me and told me they were holding auditions for some new Baristas to join the channel. I was immediately nervous and excited all at once by the prospect… but first, a little history!

I stumbled upon the channel almost a year ago and I totally fell in love with it. The Baristas are funny, informative, friendly, and I could relate to a lot of the things they were mentioning as a lot of it sheds light on working for Starbucks as well as passing on little bits of information or learning to our customers. A few months ago they held auditions and after getting so many great responses they extended from having a video every five days to having a video posted every day of the week. I so wanted to audition that time around but between work and the ridiculous computer I was using at the time it never quite happened. However, this time, armed with my MacBook and the will of a tiger… I recorded and uploaded my audition video. For those of you who didn’t catch it from my Twitter feed, here it is again!

I would just like to point out that I am not in fact trying to make shadow animals to make a point in this video… but the thumbnail was just funny to change.

I uploaded that video on Thursday of last week, a day before the deadline… and waited… I had told some of the partners in my store that I’d applied and all weekend we were chatting about the channel and how fun it would be if I made it on there. Then towards the end of the weekend I received the amazing news that I was one of two new baristas chosen to be a part of the channel. The noises I made in excitement probably could not be described as human, but hey, that’s what happens when I get excited!

So I’ll be your new Thursday barista! My first video will be uploaded tomorrow and will be a general introduction of myself to the channel (I’ll edit this entry afterwards to add the video the end of this post).

I’m still going to be blogging and hopefully with this new development you guys will see a bit more activity round these parts, as I’ll cross post my videos to the blog and similar to what I’ve done here, I’ll add on any extra things I didn’t talk about in the video or share any additional thoughts. To get all of our videos on your YouTube feed you should go and subscribe to the Five Awesome Baristas channel!

EDIT: As promised, here’s my first every video that was posted on Thursday! Aaaahhh!
 

My current state of affairs…

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So I wanted to give you all a little update about what’s going on in my Starbucks life at the moment. There’s been a pretty dramatic change. I went on two weeks holiday from work, and returned on the 5th of December, only not to my home store on Above Bar Street in Southampton, but to a store a little way away… in a slightly different role. 

I’m currently holding another store for the entire month of December! On my own! I’m not sure how to explain this to non-partners… I guess I’ve gone from a Supervisor to a Temporary Store Manager? I think that’s the easiest way to describe it.

I’m really enjoying it so far and the team in the store are really great. It’s a huge challenge for me and as I’ve mentioned before – becoming a store manager is one of my more immediate goals within this company so when things like this come up I naturally jump at the chance. I’m lucky enough to have an existing SM who really believes in my ability and has been preparing me for six months on the role and making sure I’m up to speed on everything that I’m responsible for. It’s nearing the end of my first week and so far so good!

The store itself is attached to a large supermarket and is slightly smaller and quieter than my current store. It’s got a strong base of regular customers and plenty of mothers with children and babies. Obviously because this store is further away than my home store I’m having to travel a lot more, my usual commute to work is a 20 minute walk however to get to the new store it’s a bus and a train, so my commute is now at least and hour – a little hectic but it’s so worth it.

So there we have it! I’m running a store! What have you all been up to?! 

Special Merchandise available in Supermarkets!

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Let me let you in to a little secret – I rarely visit supermarkets. My boyfriend works nights and he does our weekly shopping early in the morning when those places are quiet and almost peaceful. We tried going together on Sunday evenings a long time ago but the sheer volume of people wielding trolleys capable of destroying my ankles was far too much for me. As much as I love working in a store when it’s busy and things are flowing, I do not love the experience of food shopping in busy supermarkets. 

My boyfriend returned home from work one morning as I was getting ready to head off to the opening shift (this frequently happens, this was a lucky morning – we got to share some coffee together before he went to bed and I went to work!) and he started telling me about some Starbucks gift boxes he saw for sale while he was shopping. Naturally I assumed the role of Starbucks-know-it-all and started rhyming off all of the boxes I knew we were selling, the types of cups inside each one, the coffee they contained, you know the drill. “Nope, nope, nope… I don’t think so, nope” was his response. Now I was intrigued. 

Fast forward a few days and we were on our way out to a family friends birthday party, and we stopped off at said supermarket to have a look at these gift boxes. I was in love! They’re very different from the ones we sell in store, in fact, they’re unlike anything I’ve seen sold in our stores before! Here’s a photo of the first one:

I’m sorry the photo isn’t so great, but the mug actually tapers down to a small base so it’s almost like a cone that’s been pushed out from about a third of the way up. Also, it’s plain red, with the stunning new logo. It comes with pre-ground House Blend, a tube of chocolate powder and a snowflake stencil to decorate your coffee. Wait. What? Yes, a stencil and chocolate powder! We’ve never done anything like this that I’ve seen here in the UK (at least not in the last 5 years, anyway) so I immediately grabbed this one from the shelf… and then I noticed this one sitting one shelf up:

More unknown merchandise? Really? I obviously grabbed them both as Marc (the boyfriend) looked at me, saw the slightly bewildered look in my eye, and said “you’d like those two then?”. “Yes… yes. I would.” The second gift box contains pre-ground Christmas Blend, two small mugs that I again haven’t ever seen before, and a small guide on how to make great coffee at home. I really adore these sets but I’m surprised that they contain never-before-seen merchandise. If you live in the UK and like to collect Starbucks items then I found these in a Tesco store. I’m not sure if this is something we do regularly around this time but either way, I’m happy. 

I’d love to show you the mugs out of their boxes but they’ve been squirreled away for me to open on Christmas morning – so watch out for my tweets on December 25th of me enjoying some lovely coffee in my new mugs!