Restaurant Operations Watch: Starbucks pours ingenuity during POS outageRestaurant Operations Watch: Starbucks pours ingenuity during POS outage

Starbucks Corp. unit-level employees and managers dealt deftly Friday with every restaurant’s IT nightmare: a widespread point-of-sale system outage.

The Seattle-based coffeehouse operator said the outage, which took place during the late afternoon and early evening Friday, was resolved within several hours, after affecting 7,400 company units in the U.S., and 1,000 locations in Canada. The outage also affected four Evolution Fresh outlets and six Teavana Tea Bar units.

Unable to ring up orders, Starbucks staff gave away drinks and food, and a number of locations closed early.

Starbucks said the outage was caused by "a failure during a daily system refresh." The company stressed that it was an internal issue, and that no external breach was involved.

Todd Bishop, co-founder and editor of the GeekWire website, said the company’s point-of-sale system runs on MICROS Simphony.

“An apparent internal Starbucks incident report — posted on Reddit by a person identified as a ‘corporate partner’ — said ‘the main POS table was deleted,’ preventing any stores from logging in and ringing transactions,” Bishop reported.

“The incident report, which has since been deleted from Reddit, described the impacted region as ‘global,’ including North America and EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa),” Bishop said.

Investment watchers said the company was adept at making lemonade out of lemons. CNBC’s Jim Cramer said, “I bet customers were thrilled with the free coffee.”

The timing of the outage also lessened its impact, as Starbucks units are generally busiest in the morning. The company, however, has been making efforts to expand its dayparts to the late afternoon and evening with a wider selection of food.

Managers, owners and Starbucks’ in-house human resources team were complimentary of the unit crews’ ability to deal with circumstances beyond their control, as evidenced by a number of Tweets throughout and after the outage:

The outage occurred a day after Starbucks reported a 12-percent increase in same-store sales for the second quarter ended March 29.

Net income in the second quarter rose 16 percent, to $494.9 million, or 33 cents a share, from $427 million, or 28 cents a share, the previous year. Second-quarter revenue rose 18 percent, to $4.6 billion.

The company also said it was seeing an increased number of transactions using the company’s mobile payment platform, which reached 8 million transactions per week in the U.S. About 16 million customers now use its mobile payment app.

In the minds of consumers, if a stalwart IT powerhouse like Starbucks has a glitch in its POS transactions, it might bode ill — and least in terms of humor — for the world in general.

Starbucks has 22,088 locations around the world.

Contact Ron Ruggless at [email protected].
Follow him on Twitter: @RonRuggless