Go back to your barista.

The app is fine. The stars are fine. But be honest about why you actually like your Starbucks. It’s not the app. It’s that somebody behind the counter knows you, remembers your weird oat-milk-no-foam thing, and hands it over like they were glad you came in.

That person is not a loyalty program. That person is a loyal employee. They’ve been there long enough to know you, and they care enough to bother, and you cannot buy that with a points system. You get it from a human who feels good about where they work.

Now flip it. You know exactly what it feels like when this breaks. New face every visit. Nobody knows your order, and you say it three times before it’s still somehow wrong. The place feels like a transaction because, to the person making your coffee, that’s all it is. They started Tuesday and they’re already applying somewhere else.

That’s turnover, and your customers feel it before your P&L does. Every time somebody quits, everything they knew about your customers walks out the door with them, and the next person your customer meets is a stranger. The loyalty you spent years building springs a slow leak.

So here’s what the loyalty conferences skip: the customer loyalty everybody’s obsessed with mostly comes downstream of employee loyalty. The brands you admire didn’t just run clever programs. They kept people around long enough to build real relationships with customers, and people stay when they feel appreciated. Costco is famously good to its own people, which is not unrelated to the fact that the guy in the aisle has been there fifteen years and actually knows where the thing you’re looking for is.

Take the Chewy thing. Nobody actually knows how it started. Chewy’s own customer service leaders have called the origins basically folklore at this point, which is a gift to anyone who enjoys a good guess. So here’s mine, and I want to be clear that it’s a guess, not a fact.

Somewhere, years ago, a customer wrote in to cancel an order because their dog had died. And an employee on the other end, not thinking about branding or retention or lifetime value, heard a person who was hurting and did the human thing. Sent flowers. Signed the card. It wasn’t a campaign, just one person having a decent reaction to another person’s worst week.

And my hunch is that’s exactly why it spread. It was never a marketing move. In a world where most brands “show they care” by mailing you a tote bag with their logo stamped on it, a real human moment is the thing that stops people cold. You can’t write that into a brand guideline. You can only hire people who’d do it on their own, and then be smart enough to stay out of their way.