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Sunday Musings: Not A Good Week For Starbuck’s

You don’t know whether to laugh or cry. A bad week for Starbuck’s. And the harder the premium Coffee company tries to fix its latest image SNAFU, the worse and more visible the cracks become!

The O'Dells - © 2023 - MSN.comThe O-Dells: Back when they were still able to smile about
the whole mess. Could have been fixed easily early on…

My late dad used to say, “It’s not really how bad you goof up, its how well you step up, and step in, and fix it.”

This post has 7 days…

He had a point. And with that in mind, let’s consider the last 7 days in Starbuck’s history.

First, a Tulsa, Oaklahoma couple discovered that a routine purchase at their neighbourhood had ballooned from about $10. to more than $4,000. Wha’ hoppen?

Cascade of embarrassing facts

First embarrassing fact: Someone, or some ghost in the cash register, added a $4,444.44 tip to the bill.

Next embarrassing fact: Neither DeeDee nor Jesse O’Dell noticed the overcharge until they tried to use the card in another store and had it declined.

The District Manager told them it was a network issue at Starbuck’s. Details? Unavailable. Him-a culpa. That’s the third embarrassing fact.

Almost immediately, the district manager mailed the O’Dell’s two cheques totalling $4,444.44 in reimbursement of the error. Dandy. But they both bounced!

Fourth embarrassing fact.

… And Starbuck’s wasn’t even getting started, yet!

“We’re, like, how can Starbucks not have the money?” Jesse told Fox 23 News. ”We contacted their customer service helpline probably 30 to 40 times that day and just blasted [them] until we could hear from somebody, and we did. We got a call from one of the representatives in Seattle. They assured us that they are sending new checks. But as of today, we still have not received checks.”

That’s a total of at least 5 embarrassing facts.

What else could go wrong?

Jesse added, he and Dee Dee were forced to cancel a family trip to Thailand due to the screw-up over the renegade credit charge. “My wife is originally from Thailand and grew up in the States. We had planned to take a trip to the country as a family on January 27, but had to cancel, and [the] tickets [were] non-refundable.”

That’s 2 more embarrassing facts in the Starbuck’s column, for a total of at least 7, depending how you add them up. And Jesse and DeeDee apparently are still out who knows how many thousand bucks for the original overcharge plus those airline tickets.

When karma strikes…

… It can cause one heck of a mess.

What a PR disaster!

What a failure of Starbuck’s internal systems!

What a time for it all to happen – the same week as Starbuck’s crowed to the media about a new artificial intelligence system it’s designing, “to help deliver custom coffee orders faster and error-free.”

My take

Just a suggestion – a guess, really: Who hasn’t, at one time or another, sat down at the computer, leaned askance on the keyboard and ended up with a whole row of random (or the same) characters? Bet the same thing could happen with a cash register. Just a goof-up. But nobody noticed until it was too late; until the horse had escaped from the barn.

The SNAFU is now a total FUBAR.

So the question now is…

… How did a relatively small goof up (which might originally been relatively easy to fix) ballooned into a huge debacle (that could cause Starbuck’s permanent image damage)?

What does the whole escapade say about Starbuck’s, its ability to step up, and – as Dad would have said – step in?

Muse on that…

~ Maggie J.