You, Starbucks worker: Your inefficiencies are showing! You lean to scoop coffee at a sub-optimal angle! You waste precious seconds with your sloppy human movements! Improve efficiency, serve coffee two seconds faster on average! Move swiftly for mother company's glory!

The Wall Street Journal reveals that the coffee company of choice for robots has a whole team of efficiency experts that will come to your Starbucks location, watch your every move, then tell you how, by plotting the movements of your arms, legs, fingers, toes, and head on a PowerPoint graph that is cross-referenced with a 3D image map of cataloging even your smallest eye twitches, you can shave several seconds off your Macchiato assembly time.

He and a 10-person "lean team" have been going from region to region armed with a stopwatch and a Mr. Potato Head toy that they challenge managers to put together and re-box in less than 45 seconds.

Huzzah for "fun" corporate thinking tools! That Mr. Potato Head is just one of the tools Starbucks used to help its super-efficient Oregon City story "cut two seconds" off its average drive-thru time (the other tool: threats). No price is too high to pay to achieve our common Starbucks goal!

If Starbucks can reduce the time each employee spends making a drink, he says, the company could make more drinks with the same number of workers or have fewer workers.

Work harder. Work faster. Work more. Work yourself out of a job!
[Pic via]