Starbucks recently lowered some prices on its drink menu, but now the chain is making headlines for just the opposite — double-charging customers for their purchases. On Friday, May 22, and half of Saturday, May 23, the coffee chain unknowingly double-charged a million customers in 7,000 stores for their debit and credit card purchases. Starbucks explained that most of its customers never noticed the "settlement processing error" — although consumers' receipts indicated the correct amount had been deducted, later twice that figure was taken out of the buyers' accounts when stores settled the transactions at the end of the day. 
Starbucks is hoping to reassure its patrons that the problem has been resolved. "As soon as we noticed the error, we had it fixed right away," a spokesperson for the company said. If you're concerned you were affected by this error, Starbucks is recommending that you contact its customer service department. Since I visit Starbucks daily, I'm checking my bank statement to make sure I wasn't charged double. Were you affected by this? Are you surprised that an error of this scale could occur within a company as large as Starbucks?
Featured
One Million Customers Double-Charged at Starbucks
11 Comments Post a Comment
More on YumSugar
Fall Award Season
Top Brands
Energie
Forzieri
Tommy Hilfiger
starbucks served over a million customers in a day and a half? [and thats only the ones that were using credit or debit]
am i oblivious or does that seem like a lot
1think about how many branches they have, and think about how many people on average you see in a typical visit. multiply by hours open. easily Starbucks services a million + people a day.
2jesssa...that seemed pretty insane to me too! but i'd bet the great majority of the customers in general were credit/debit customers...but that was only 7,000 stores!!
good luck getting in touch with their customer service department!! I'd imagine the hold times on those calls are running rather long today..hhaha
3i read about this yesterday - and i guess it's probably not as uncommon as we'd like to think. the good thing though is that they realized the error immediately and fixed it. right?
4Theives.
5I'm not really surprised. I work at Sephora and our website was down for more than 24 hours. Even with all the financial resources large companies have, their systems are not immune to technical glitches. I will definitely be checking my bank statement as I usually pay with credit at Starbucks.
6Hmm. I'm gonna look at my bank statement now and see if anything looks wrong. I usually just glance over it since I use debut, but I'll take a closer look when it comes.
7I'm not surprised. I work at Starbucks and our system crashes at least once a month.
8I havent bought starbucks in quite sometime so thankfully I don't have to be on the lookout for this
9It's good that they know it happened and fixed the glitch. It's sad that they don't seem to have taken it upon themselves to automatically pay back their customers, although they must have records.
10"Are you surprised that an error of this scale could occur within a company as large as Starbucks?"
It is because Starbucks is so large that an error of this scale could occur. If they pushed some kind of software upgrade to their registers that accidentally could cause errors of this kind...it's going to cause it on a large scale. A small company could easily have the same kind of software bug, but it would never cause anything of this scale.
11Post New Comment
Please share your opinion with our community, but make sure it is on topic and follows our Community Rules. We moderate comments and prohibit personal attacks, threats, spam, lewd images, or the promotion of your personal website.