Starbucks spent years solving a very specific problem: making it easier for customers to buy coffee. As a result, it spent a lot of money on things like mobile ordering and redesigning its stores to accommodate customers picking up drinks. The idea was to get people in and out as quickly as possible. In the process, however, it made a mistake that may have cost the company far more than it realized. It forgot why people wanted to go there in the first place.

Now, under CEO Brian Niccol, Starbucks is spending more than $1 billion to bring back the thing it spent years eliminating. Sure, it’s bringing back comfortable chairs and more seating, but really, it’s bringing back the reason you went to Starbucks in the first place. It’s all a part of Niccol’s ambitious “Back to Starbucks” strategy, and there are reasons to think it’s working.

The latest evidence came Tuesday, when Starbucks rolled out a new store design that—on the surface—looks like a relatively minor change. The company says it will experiment with building smaller coffeehouses that have shorter counters, more compact food displays, and more flexible seating arrangements. This will allow Starbucks to open stores in locations that might otherwise be too small, while keeping the experience customers expect.

That experience part is what’s most important here. Starbucks isn’t just trying to make its stores smaller. It’s trying to make them feel more like Starbucks.

There was a time when Starbucks wasn’t just somewhere you stopped to get coffee.

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