Its cafes certainly seem to be everywhere you look.

But behind that familiar green siren are stores that are struggling with declining sales, overworked employees, and a company that's badly in need of a fresh start.

Starbucks this morning, down about 1.5%.

Starbucks facing a walkout of more than 1,000 employees.

There's a lot of excuses. It seemed like there was a lot of panic.

I'll tell you what though, you've not been to Starbucks.

No, you haven't. The worst sales.

We're seeing traffic levels that outside of the pandemic we haven't seen except in recessions.

We started to see almost the equivalent of spaghetti being thrown against a wall to see what would stick.

Drink orders have become more complicated.

The wait times are kind of obnoxious at times.

It seems like, you know, one moment there was one CEO and things were going pretty well.

And then suddenly the picture started to change.

There have definitely been a couple of moments of, what just happened here?

Now a new CEO hopes to turn the company around by bringing Starbucks back to its roots.

If it's not too late.

The Starbucks story as we know it started in the early 80s with Howard Schultz, who was working for a small Seattle company that was selling whole bean and ground coffee.

During that time, coffee for Americans was basically just fuel.

Howard Schultz wanted to turn it into an elevated European style experience.

From the early days, Schultz was really trying to make Starbucks what basically he called the third place, which is somewhere outside of your work or your home where you can just hang out.

The idea took off.

Today, Starbucks is the second largest restaurant chain in the world behind only McDonald's, with over 40,000 locations worldwide.

What Starbucks did very well was essentially decommoditizing a commodity.

Coffee is a commodity.

They made it an aspirational beverage and they sold this idea that you can have this everyday luxury.

Decades later, Starbucks has evolved into a ubiquitous brand, one that's now more everyday than luxury.

And the cafe experience has changed too.

Customers today purchase more iced coffees and complex concoctions like frappuccinos and lemonade refreshers than they do hot coffees.

Can I get a grande dragon fruit refresher blended with strawberry puree?

And then could you add also...

Sorry, it's kind of a complicated one.

Starbucks is a brand that was born serving hot beverages.

The preponderance of what they serve in the U.S. now is cold.

So it's a little bit like building, I don't know, a Cadillac in a Buick factory.

The Starbucks business changed a lot during the pandemic.

And one of the things that surged was mobile ordering.

So on the app, people find it a lot easier to make their drinks more complicated.

For baristas, the combination of more to-go orders, more cold drinks, and more customization proved to be really stressful.

And a lot of them felt that they weren't really set up for success.

And they were burning out pretty quickly.

All of this added fuel to a unionization movement that started in Buffalo, New York in 2021.

Employees at Starbucks in Buffalo made history today, becoming the first baristas in the company to vote in favor of joining a union.

One of the really interesting aspects of the Starbucks unionization drive is that it sort of challenged this perception of Starbucks as a really good employer.

I'm Gio Garza. I am a barista in the Chicagoland area.

And our store recently unionized on September 27, 2024.

My store has been having a lot of issues with short staffing, especially during the nighttime hours.

We haven't been able to get a lot of the tasks that we need to get done.

Sometimes when we're super stressed, we don't really have the time to create that connection with the customer.

And it's not that we don't want to. We really do. We love our customers.

But when we're always dealing with understaffing or things breaking, then we're not able to create that connection.

In the midst of the unionization push, Howard Schultz, who'd stepped down as CEO in 2017, returned to the company.

Schultz took the unionization effort personally and as an affront to this image of a worker-friendly brand that he had built.

Over the next year, the company closed several stores that had unionized.

By March 2023, when Schultz appeared in front of a Senate committee, workers felt the company was stonewalling at the bargaining table.

Over the past 18 months, Starbucks has waged the most aggressive and illegal union-busting campaign in the modern history of our country.

Sir, Starbucks Coffee Company unequivocally, and let me set the tone for this very early on, has not broken the law.

Okay.

By then, Schultz had turned over control of the company to Lakshman Narasimhan, a former Pepsi executive.

The two parties were sort of locked into an impasse for a while over the contract.

So there is no contract just yet.

But earlier this year, they actually reopened those lines of communication.

I think that we are pushing forward for a really, really good chance that we will have a contract that we are both satisfied with.

I am also super excited and happy that I'm able to join the union with 10,500-plus workers.

So it's really empowering for us.

This is so crazy.

That's the end now.

Starbucks woes haven't disappeared.

The company's bottom line took a hit when dueling boycotts erupted over the war in Gaza after the union shared social media posts expressing solidarity with Palestinians.

The company says it's never taken an official position on the war.

Meanwhile, China, one of Starbucks' biggest regions for growth, has become another trouble spot.

The pandemic hit the Chinese market particularly hard.

And recently, Starbucks lost the mantle of the country's largest coffee retailer to Lockheed Coffee, which automates a lot of the work, which allows it to save money and basically charge customers less.

China has been quite volatile during the pandemic and post-pandemic.

And what we've seen this year has been very similar to what some other brands have seen, which is that that more casual consumer, the non-rewards consumer, has been tougher to get back in as frequently.

In August, the company announced it was going with yet another new CEO.

It's third in three years.

Brian Nicol has had a lot of experience in the restaurant industry.

Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Yum! Brands, and then Chipotle.

Starbucks is a different animal here.

Nicol is an experienced restaurant executive.

He led Chipotle starting in 2018 when the company was reeling from a lot of issues.

One of the big ones was a contamination issue that had actually sickened a bunch of people.

But he managed to turn the brand around.

The Starbucks board hired Brian Nicol at this inflection point for the company where they're really trying to figure out if they're going to be this to-go machine or if they're going to go back to being the neighborhood coffeehouse.

I think, as you know, last month I made a commitment that we would get back to Starbucks.

That means focusing on what has always set Starbucks apart, a welcoming coffeehouse where people gather and where we serve the finest coffee, handcrafted by our skilled baristas.

But the company's latest sales results show just how far it still has to go.

If you look at what Brian did with Chipotle, very, very good storytelling about real food that generally resonated very well, obviously, with consumers, given Chipotle's sales trend subsequently.

So that's the hope, is that Brian can turn this around, although obviously it will probably take some time.

Copyright Australian Broadcasting Corporation