June 17th, 2009
Starbucks has Expensive Coffee
If you bought coffee at Starbucks over Memorial Day weekend with a credit card you should go back and double check your credit card bill. A glitch in their credit card processing system charged approximately one million debit and credit card customers twice their bill. This involved over 7,800 Starbucks across the nation. Starbucks did notice the discrepancy a few days later and contacted the bank to begin reconciliation of these double charges. A spokesperson for Starbucks released a statement apologizing to its customers for the inconvenience and confusion.
This type of glitch illustrates how even well known and reputable companies still have hiccups, and that it’s up to you, to maintain and watch over what you are charged on your credit card. Macy’s experienced a similar error during the 2008 holiday season. However, Macy’s did not disclose the amount of duplicated charges and how many customers it affected.
While this type of credit card error would most likely not set off a fraud monitoring system, it provides an example of how things beyond your control can still affect your credit report. If you only take a cursory glance at your credit card bill when it comes in, you make yourself susceptible to these types of accounting errors. Worse, if you are not diligent on checking your credit card statements, you can find yourself victim of credit card or identity fraud.
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Their drinks are so expensive that it normally just feels like you are being charge twice anyways.
Its self control. I don’t drink anything from there anymore.
I did visit Starbucks that day and this did not happen to me. If it did I probably would have never known. I take my receipt, balance my check book and call it a day.
Like you said Eliot, this can happen to all companies big and small.
Financially Tough, the prices are a little high. I’ve cut my latte budget big time.