Starbucks Outage Forces Popular Coffee Chain Store To Close Early Friday Evening
A computer outage Friday night led to the early closure of 7,400 U.S. and 1,000 Canada Starbucks, but it’s business as usual Saturday for the popular coffee shop.
According to the company, the issue was resolved late Friday, just hours after it began. The glitch caused many stores to give free drinks to their customers. The company issued a statement that apologized to its customers for the inconvenience.
Starbucks said a failure in the daily system refresh was the reason for the outage. Company spokesman Jim Olsen said the matter was an internal one and what no external reasons was the result of the outage.
The issue started along the East Coast, with workers writing signs that read “Cash Only” and were giving free drinks and food away because they could not ring orders up on their registers. Starbucks had said, in the beginning, that stores would stay open during the outage but changed its mind relatively quickly, closing the stores.
The busiest time of the day for Starbucks is in the morning when people are headed to work, which meant the outage could have had a more of an impact on sales if it had happened earlier in the day. The company has expanded its menu of drinks and food to bring in customers during the afternoon and evening hours.
John Gordon, a restaurant consultant and industry analyst, said the majority of fast food chains have a computer system that allows them to track sales at their registers throughout the company. However, Starbuck system is different has most of the locations in the U.S. is company owned, not franchise-owned.
This means the system the company uses is a bit more integrated across its stores.
Some customers were a bit taken back about the news with others just shrugging it off. Some Starbucks staff handed out free tea and coffee to their distraught customers.
The issue did not affect the over 4,800 licensed Starbucks in U.S. supermarkets, airports and other places as well as the 300 licensed Canadian stores.
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