During a busy rush in the evening, the customer now second in the queue was anxious and in a hurry. The customer first in the queue quite rightly took her position in the queue and decided to step forward to give her order and make payment. An Iced Latte. Simple.

The customer behind insists his transaction will be quicker and interrupts. I advise him I will be with him next. Customer in-front feels he is being rude and seems agitated by his impatient remarks. He insists he can see his Too Good To Go bag and asks if he can quickly grab it. It is not that simple as I will later explain... I ask him to wait.

By the time I had placed the Grande plastic cup and queued the espresso shots, the first customer has now fallen to the pressure and demands that the customer behind is served before her. To her disgust I inform her he will have to wait his turn, 30 seconds. Her simple drink is literally being made.

Not only is the espresso being poured by the machine into the cup, on hearing the delightful phrase "Too Good To Go" I opened the app. The Iced Latte will be done before it has loaded up. This is why I chose not to swap priority.

To reduce friction towards Starbucks customers and Too Good To Go collectors I make bags up in advance as it saves a great deal of time. Some people cannot understand that we aren't just throwing in Starbucks food stock into bags and giving them away to anyone flashing an app in our faces. Each Too Good To Go bag needs to go through the till and it needs to be confirmed as collected on the app (otherwise payment isn't received by the company). Too Good To Go isn't integrated into the POS, we have to enter the details manually. We have to send away the receipts for each Too Good To Go transaction for validation also.

So despite how useful the preparation of the bags in advance is, a Too Good To Go transaction still takes 3 times longer than a typical transaction.

First customer receives her drink, seems complexed and vacates. I warmly greet the customer behind who has since moved forward to first in the queue, it has only been 20 seconds, I have the MyStore portal open on my phone... and customer hadn't took the opportunity to swipe to collect yet. Which I honestly don't recommend doing unless you have been requested to... but he is in an rush right?

Customer hadn't even got the app open ready, instead having the email confirmation of the reservation. A good 30-40 seconds later, he finally swipes, I go get him a bag I have just assigned to him... and as a goodwill gesture I completed the POS parts of the transaction later saving him a couple of minutes (not to mention the queue was building).

He dashed out at a rate of knots. Perhaps he has missed his train. Too Good To Go is a reservation, you will get refunded if you don't collect and you can cancel. If you don't have the time look for alternative options. As an adult, don't look at it as having 1-3 minutes to collect a Too Good To Go bag before catching a connecting train; consider there might be other people in the queue with complicated orders and that the outlet might be understaffed in the evenings. Not everyone will let you jump the queue and you might get someone like me that prioritises Starbucks customers over app collectors.