Starbucks.jpg (Photo : Reuters)
Starbucks shops in the United States announced Thursday an expansion on their offerings which would soon include beer, wine and an evening menu in a bid to improve declining traffic.
The world's largest coffee chain revealed an expanded menu as well as a mobile ordering system for thousands of branches in the U.S. during its biennial investor conference held in Seattle on Dec. 4.
During the conference, the company declared its plan to reap some $1-billion-worth of sales from offering beer, wine and additional options for the lunch and evening menus in almost 3,000 out of its 11,900 branches in the country.
Aside from this, Starbucks also launched a mobile ordering and payment system which would enable their patrons to order their frappes online.
All the changes scheduled to take effect in 2015 were introduced in order to ease the waning Starbucks traffic in the U.S., blamed mainly on the rise of online shopping that kept Starbucks customers at home and away from malls and commercial establishments.
In its most recent quarter, traffic in the Starbucks Americas division only increased by 1 percent, a much lower rate than the prior year's 5 percent.
Starbucks also announced in the conference the United States debut of a delivery service, coffee trucks and smaller express shops, and some upscale "reserve" shops during incoming months.
The coffee chain, which serves an estimated 70 million customers through about 21,000 branches all over the world weekly, predicts a revenue of almost $30 billion by 2019 compared to the $16 billion it earned by the end of fiscal year 2014.
