If you can survive a week in Disney World without caffeine, you deserve a trophy, a medal, and a street named after you.

Starbucks

But seriously, making it through multiple days at The Most Magical Place on Earth without a little pick-me-up would be incredibly challenging, and that’s why there are PLENTY of coffee options around the parks. Each Disney World park has multiple restaurants serving coffee, and it feels like you can’t sneeze without hitting a Joffrey’s coffee kiosk. But today, we’re here to talk about the Starbucks spots…and the problem with them!

Each Disney World park is home to a Starbucks location, where you can order all your favorite drinks from home, as well as some classic bakery and pastry items. The four Starbucks locations in the parks are Main Street Bakery (Magic Kingdom), Connections Cafe (EPCOT), Trolley Car Cafe (Hollywood Studios), and Creature Comforts (Animal Kingdom). They’re all located pretty centrally in the park, usually not too far from the entrance.

It gets REAL busy in here in the mornings.

And in the mornings, as you might expect, you’ll find these Starbucks spots get quite crowded! We’ve noticed some of the heaviest crowds after rope drop, usually around 10AM when people need a mid-morning boost after an early wake-up call. This also coincides with the time when the latecomers start to arrive at the parks.

However, that’s not the only time they get crowded — there’s also usually an afternoon rush when visitors hit the midday slump. And if you need some coffee during that time, we might have some bad news.

Trolley Car Cafe

A problem that we’ve come across multiple times in the past at Starbucks locations is that they sometimes CLOSE part of the restaurant after the initial morning rush. What do we mean? Well, each Starbucks in the Disney World parks is designed with two separate queues — so you can either wait in line to order on the left side of the counter or the right side of the counter. There isn’t a difference in the offerings or the experience, really, but it’s just a way to get a higher volume of guests through the restaurant at once.

Connections Cafe crowds

We’ve often come into Starbucks in the afternoon to find that they have closed one side of the line as demand decreases later in the day. This isn’t usually a problem if the restaurant isn’t crowded, but more than once we’ve seen the lines get REALLY long later in the day because Starbucks is operating at “half capacity.”

Note that this doesn’t happen ALL the time. We’ve also seen plenty of afternoons when both sides of the Starbucks locations remain open. It really depends on the day, so you might be taking a gamble by visiting Starbucks.

Creature Comforts in Animal Kingdom

So just be warned — if you want to grab coffee for an afternoon boost, you may run into this problem and actually end up waiting LONGER than if you’d grabbed your coffee in the morning. It doesn’t happen in every Starbucks every day, but it’s a fairly common occurrence.

Entering Connections Cafe

If you run into this problem, you can always choose to visit a Joffrey’s kiosk instead (which usually have shorter lines)!

We’ll keep you in the loop with any more coffee tips and tricks from Disney World, as well as all the advice you need to navigate the parks successfully! Stay tuned to DFB for the latest updates.

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Do you get Starbucks or Joffrey’s in Disney World? Tell us in the comments!