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Starbucks is back to making money after a computer failure yesterday forced the company to give away countless free drinks. The company will fortunately now be able to use the money to continue in a partnership with Arizona State University to help its employees earn college diplomas.
What apparently was the result of a computer system refresh on Friday afternoon and not come nefarious hacker or a terrorist organization attempting to destroy America’s greatest franchise since McDonalds has been fixed.
On Friday joyous Starbucks addicts – or java junkies if you prefer – tweeted their elation with what must have cost the coffee bar millions tweeting comments like, “Starbucks register was down so our drinks were free #blessed.”
And, “#Starbucks is honoring customers’ purchases, despite their broken computer system, according to Pasadena barista. #Free drinks #confirmed.”
Eventually all Starbucks stores were forced to shut their doors early.
Starbucks tweeted, “We’re sorry about the [point-of-sale] issue and working as fast as we can to fix it. What a week!”
It released a statement this morning saying, “The point of sale register outage has been resolved and all Starbucks stores in the U.S. and Canada are opening for business today as usual. Our Evolution Fresh and Teavana Tea Bar stores are also opening as scheduled. As previously stated, the outage was caused by an internal failure during a daily system refresh and was not the result of an external breach. We apologize to our customers for this inconvenience.”
Meanwhile, The Atlantic’s May issue features a story on how Starbucks is helping its baristas get a college education. The program allows any of its more than 1335, 000 employees who work at least 20 hours a week take courses at Arizona State.
The employees who do not yet have at least two years of college credits under their belts get a 22% tuition discount until they reach that level. Everyone with more than two years credit gets free tuition.
This helps deal with the growing problem in America of people who are forced to drop out of college because they can’t afford it and/or must go to work instead.
Starbucks founder and CEO Howard Schultz told The Atlantic, “To build a great, enduring company that is so people-based, as Starbucks is. We have to bring our people along on this journey and demonstrate we are sharing the success.”
