- Shake Shack’s founder, Danny Meyer, said that always saying “yes” to the customer is risky.
- Too much customization, he said, may not work in favor of the business or the customer.
- Meyer referenced Starbucks, saying it offers too many “permutations” of lattes.
Shake Shack’s founder, Danny Meyer, believes too much customization might spoil the broth.
In a podcast interview with Yahoo Finance’s “Opening Bid,” released on Wednesday, Meyer told host Brian Sozzi about how saying “yes” to customers excessively may put companies at a disadvantage and be a disservice to the average customer.
Sozzi asked Meyer what he thinks about companies like Starbucks that offer customers tons of product customization.
He said that Starbucks’ newly instated CEO, Brian Niccol, “is about to make some changes to the menu, pull back some of the clutter, and get things off the menu that didn’t make sense.”
To this, Meyer responded that in the name of hospitality, “good restaurants figure out how to find a ‘yes.'”
“And Starbucks certainly figured out for years how to say the ‘yes,'” Meyer said. “You want your latte, how? I can’t even go through all the permutations, there’s so many.”
But he said that if taken too far, a company’s strength in saying “yes” to the customer could become a weakness.
“That doesn’t work to the benefit of the average customer,” Meyer said. “And the average customer may have a declining good experience because of all the hospitality we’re giving, saying ‘yes.'”
He added that all the alternatives “gum up the works for the average person who just wants a tall coffee.”
Meyer said he had to restrain himself to keep Shake Shack’s menu simple. The chain used to have more milkshakes than it now does, and it used to have daily frozen custard flavors, which it has scaled back on.
Meyer, who founded Shake Shack in 2001, said that one piece of advice he follows is, “Can we make it so that the bigger we get, the smaller we act?”
“And there’s magic in trying to figure that out,” he said to Sozzi.
The fast-food chain, which started as a hot dog stand in New York City’s Madison Square Park, now has over 510 locations worldwide, including over 180 international locations. Its stock price is up 85% this year.
In addition to being the head of Shake Shack, Meyer is also the chairman of Union Square Hospitality Group, which owns a portfolio of popular New York restaurants, including Gramercy Tavern and The Modern.
Starbucks’ new chief, Niccol, has announced that he will simplify the chain’s offerings.
Visiting a Starbucks store in the US “can feel transactional,” and the “menus can feel overwhelming,” Niccol wrote in an open letter in September.
He aims to make Starbucks more warm and inviting, deliver coffee faster to customers, and simplify online ordering to reduce the burden on baristas.
Representatives for Shake Shack did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, sent outside regular business hours.
