Courtesy of Benzinga.
You’d think that charging $6 a cup for coffee would be a crime in and of itself.
I mean, for that price, you can buy an entire can of home brew and have coffee for weeks. But then, I suppose you miss out on the joy of waiting in a long line to have some snot-nosed kid put together your extra creamy skim foam grande large small medium warm cappuchino mocha caramel with cream.
At least, that’s what it sounds like to me when you’re ordering some obnoxious drink. Some of us prefer to keep it simple. I, after all, like my coffee the same way I like my presidents: black, strong, and productive. That’s why I avoid Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX) and other premium coffee chains.
In case common freaking sense isn’t reason enough to avoid the $6 latte, now you can add “scam artists” along with “overpriced crap” to the list of Starbucks associations.
According to the New York Times, Starbucks was busted by regulators in Massachusetts, who found that Starbucks was tacking on surcharges to bulk purchases and not informing its customers of the additional charges.
The Massachusetts Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation found this summer that Starbucks wasn’t notifying its customers that it was adding a surcharge of about $1.50 for bags of beans weighing less than a pound.
At the time, a pound of beans cost $11.95 a pound. Customers who bought half a pound should have been charged $5.98, which would be half the price of a pound. Instead, they were charged $7.45 — with the hidden, unstated surcharge making up the difference.
My kindergartener can sort that math out. It’s shocking that the customers of Starbucks couldn’t. It’s even more damning that the coffee giant thought it could get away with it.
According to the Times, Massachusetts law requires companies to disclose customers of such a surcharge, either by a sign or in person. Starbucks did neither. In fact, they didn’t even bother listing the surcharge on the receipt.
For the violations, Starbucks was fined a whopping $1,575, or roughly 0.00000001 percent of the type of what it would take for companies to stop screwing people. The company has now stopped the practice. What other shady practices it might engage in are unknown at this time.
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