SACRAMENTO —
A double-shot of stress for Starbucks employees up and down the West Coast Friday.
“We were just working and around four o’clock our computers just started shutting down,” said Ceres barista Desiree Zapata.
“They just completely shut down,” sighed her co-worker Veronica Martinez.
What forced normally accommodating baristas to turn away coffee connoisseurs?
A ‘trenta’ size problem with their payment system.
“That their cash register was down and that they were only accepting cash,” that’s what Sally Miller heard when she stopped in for a danish.
There was a strange “frappening” if you will, during a normal, daily refresh of the point-of-sale registers at company-owned stores in the U.S, and Canada.
It caused an outage that lasted for hours.
While the company first sent out a statement that the 8,000 affected stores would be staying open, FOX40 found some inconsistencies.
A hand-scrawled sign under one of those familiar green awnings in Sacramento read ‘closed’ in tall letters.
Bryan Green was still able to get his regular fix–a soy latte medium–because he had cash on hand to hand over at the Starbucks next to Sacramento’s Amtrak station.
Baristas there, who were processing orders manually, were hoping for a closure order like the ones given for stores in Ceres and Roseville. But it didn’t come.
So some things on a menu that prices a gallon of coffee way over a gallon of gas weren’t so pricey Friday.
“I think they’re having a hard time, having to look for the prices. They couldn’t find the hot chocolate, so they said on the house,” said Miller.
Other locations like the one at 19th & J streets in Sacramento just made all of their items free.
“Way to be a philanthropist Starbucks,” said James Givens.
Starbucks is apologizing for the inconvenience, but the situation’s left many of the coffee-crazed just asking ‘What the frap?’
“I was disappointed,” said Christina Yates of Ceres.
“They looked open. There were people inside working, but they wouldn’t serve me,” she said.
Late Friday Starbucks customer service reps told FOX40 the company expected to have stores open Saturday and that the register issue should be completely resolved within 48 hours.
