When Starbucks Confuses Theater for Leadership

Six straight quarters of decline—and Starbucks thinks the fix is eye contact and a scripted acronym called LATTE.

That isn’t leadership. That’s theater.

Dutch Bros and Luckin aren’t winning with friendliness. They’re winning with system design: throughput, technology, efficiency.

This isn’t just a coffee story—it’s a CEO story. Drift doesn’t arrive as collapse. It starts with substitution: smiles replace speed, scripts replace standards, culture replaces enforcement.

Starbucks shows how giants become vulnerable. The question is whether your enterprise is next.