Starbucks UK

Arr! Me be leaving’ me old review below deck arr! But y’all should know the recent update be askin’ me what ounces me take my drink in arrrr! Lucky me a pirate over the age of 70 or else if I were a youngin one would be clueless of the ounces, arrr! Unless one be a yank of corse arrr! Me hearties! Maybe buy coffee from a coffee shop from the 21st century, arrr! Original review from 2020: My flat mate and I were out a walk and decided to place an order to collect. Had to download this new app, which doesn't accept Apple Pay meaning I had to enter a load of card details while standing outside the cafe. Not happy to even do this as I don’t see why Starbucks need to permanently store my card information in this day and age, is security not important to you? Due to various errors and issues the whole process took 20 mins before I could “top up” £10 (and why is this a thing!? Why do I need to “top up” a card by £10 to buy £7 of drinks!?) and place an order. One of the drinks I ordered didn’t even seem to get communicated to the store, which the staff put right, thank goodness the staff seem to have more sense than Starbucks HQ! I won’t be using the app again until I can place an order by Apple Pay for the amount of the order I’m placing. You know, the way every other company does it in 2020!

Handy, nice to skip the queue, but my god is it slow and unresponsive. It feels like every time I try to use it I have to wait for a minute or two at the location selection screen regardless of where I am or network conditions. Often times I lose patience and kill the app to try again. Favouriting a location is utterly pointless because the favourite list only loads after the main location search loads, at which point you don’t need the favourite list, so the amount of time saved is always 0 or negative. When you’re ready to check out it takes ages to simply give me the total, and then woe be unto me if I want to switch to a different payment method. Even switching from eat-in to takeaway has a loading time. Want to use app balance? Let’s check how much you have: loading… oh sorry you’re out of money. Click on reload: loading… click to choose payment method: loading…. choose amount: loading. Checkout: loading…. You get the picture. Sometimes I’d rather just wait in queue. Look if you want to make an app that needs to make a round trip to the server even to scratch its nose, the server has to be fast. There are reviews from two years ago complaining of this.

Starbucks card member since 2001, global app user for many years. After the breathlessly heralded app update, my gold status disappeared, accrued stars from a transaction 3 weeks ago have not appeared and of course the early days password reset drama ! Nothing but useless or sometimes deliberately misleading “help” information on the web site or endless parroting of the same poor quality information on social media. I had a day in London this week, avoided Starbucks and used Pret instead. When this debacle gets fixed, let’s hope Starbucks UK make some sort of reparation to their customers (and of course their many franchisees) who have been dealt this poor hand, however £50 spend for a reward is poor value and this is driving card and app users straight to their competitors. I guess it’ll end up as a “how not to treat loyal customers” case study in the future ! Your website help information just glosses over the app issues and paints a rosy picture - it needs to at least issue a realistic update. Costa and Caffè Nero apps work perfectly and update instantly - it’s not rocket science to develop and test an app, but the one you have developed and the back-end system along with it is obviously broken.