Starbucks goes nationwide with order-ahead app

Starbucks has been trying out a new feature in the some cities called Mobile Order and Pay, where you can order your Starbucks coffee and food ahead of time and pick it up in store with no wait. Well, there’s an app for that!

Starbucks chief digital officer Adam Brotman said aside from order and payment features, patrons can also customize their food and beverage items, as well as check for inventory records, and monitor pickup time.

The mobile order and pay app, which was expanded from the Pacific Northwest to about 4,000 stores in 22 states in June, was initially slated to be rolled out across the country near the end of the year. It’s only available in the US, but the company plans on extending mobile orders to limited stores in Canada and the United Kingdom next month. While no one wants to waste time waiting on lunch, Starbucks is a decidedly in-and-out affair.

According to Starbucks executives, it was so popular, allowing coffee drinkers to skip long lines as they order and pay for their drinks on their smartphones, that they accelerated the expansion.

Those who aren’t fans of human interaction can now forgo most of it, but the feature currently only works in stores that Starbucks owns in the US. Taco Bell introduced a mobile app past year that lets people order and pay in advance, and Wendy’s says it’s testing the option. Today’s launch alone covers 3,400 stores in some of its top markets, including San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and Boston. Well fret no more because you can now place your order via your smartphone at any of the 7,400 locations across the U.S.

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has made clear that he sees mobile ordering as a segue for the coffee company into delivery service. If you press on the store it will bring up the map, give you its store hours, phone number, hours of operation and its amenities – oh, and you can have google maps take you there turn-by-turn.

The company announced that it invested for many years in mobile technology, making scanning the phone at checkout a common thing amongst a sizable customer base.