Did you get a chance to go by Starbucks last night?  If you did, then you probably came away with a surprisingly large amount of money.  No, Starbucks wasn’t giving cash away, but they weren’t taking cash away either.  Last night, the Starbucks point of sale system went down and the company had no way to charge customers at their over 8000 locations throughout the US and Canada, and that means when there’s no way to charge, they’re not going to bother doing it.  Starbucks gave away thousands of free items after their register system crashed yesterday.

The outage affected Starbucks, Evolution Fresh, and Teavana stores around the country.  In some places, they closed the doors; in other places, they opened them and just let customers have whatever they wanted, free of charge.  Normally I’d complain about the inability of people to operate a business without a computer, but in the same situation, there’d be no way I could actually keep track of sales and calculate taxes and whatnot, so I’d probably do the same thing if I was Starbucks.  At least until all the brewed coffee was gone and the pastry case was empty, then I’d close the doors.

Still, if you’re looking for a repeat today, don’t bother.  The company blames the outage on a routine software update gone awry, and they claim to have fixed the problem overnight.  Still, for a few hours, Starbucks was literally giving back to the community.

Tags: starbucks, teavana, evolution fresh, starbucks gives away free items on friday night, starbucks register outage, starbucks register outage causes company to give away free food, free starbucks thanks to outage, point of sale register outage, unusual business problems, coffee

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