[hombre_fatal]

You'd need a ticketing system so people even remember what their number is. And for what upside when names work fine?

[another-dave]

Names work fine if your name is easily pronounced. Otherwise you end up making up a name just for Starbucks which takes away from their personalisation thing

[yencabulator]

Taking away a corporation's personalisation thing sounds like a good idea.

[a1369209993]

It's definitely a good idea, but it's not clear why the corporation would want that.

[berti]

It works fine for McDonalds. They just print the number in a huge typeface on the receipt. They don’t have to pretend to care, and I don’t have to mess around spelling my name out.

[yencabulator]

The world is moving on from paper receipts, though. For regular Starbucks customers, payment by phone is routine, and there's normally no paper receipt.

[astura]

There's potential overlap using names when it's busy. This happened to me once and my name isn't particularly common.

[TylerE]

Do names work fine when 3 John's walk in in a row?

[scollet]

> ticketing system

Receipt.

[bshimmin]

Yes, precisely. Even my local (definitely not very high-tech) fish-and-chip shop can manage to print a number at the top of the receipt, and then call that number out when your food is ready.

Starbucks ask you for a name to make the process seem more personal and friendly. Apparently they started doing this in 2012; it was met with quite some head-scratching in the UK at the time. The other big coffee chains here do not do this, to the best of my knowledge.