Starbucks Added $4,000 Tip To A Customer's Bill

How much would you pay for a good coffee? Most would probably agree $4,000 is more than most people can afford for a lot of things, much less coffee. And as much as we love our coffee, that's just too much. Insider reported in August 2022 that the average cost was 7.6% more per cup than in 2021 due to inflation, but that hasn't stopped people from paying. In fact, Macro Trends reported that Starbucks had boosted its profit by 5.52% by the end of 2022.

On January 7, however, a couple in Tulsa Oklahoma was in for a surprise that was justified by any metric. They discovered they had actually paid an extra $4,000 for two coffees at Starbucks — an order they'd been getting regularly for years. This isn't the first time an incident of this sort has occurred, as one Colorado resort managed to charge a whopping $5,700 for one coffee back in 2021 — in that case, it took the customer two months to get a refund.

In this recent incident, Jesse O'Dell told FOX 23 that he had visited the Starbucks on the ever day for nearly two decades. The couple's order usually comes to around $10, but this time, the order totaled a whole lot more.

DeeDee O'Dell went to pay for her shopping at a local mall when the card she used was declined, according to FOX 23. It's an embarrassing situation that we all dread, especially knowing that there should be money in your account. She said that she tried the card "again and again" before finally telling them that she would check her account. That's when she discovered that the card had an unusually high charge from Starbucks, an extra $4,444.44 to be exact. In the majority of cases, you would expect the store would be able to rectify their mistake fairly quickly, refunding the amount back to the original card. However, the O'Dells say this is when the "real hell started" (per FOX 23).

The store sent the couple two checks totaling the full amount they had been overcharged, but both deposits bounced. Despite numerous attempts to contact the store and Starbucks' head offices in Seattle, they say they have yet to receive their money back. Due to the incident affecting their family budget, they were forced to cancel a trip with non-refundable tickets to DeeDee's native country of Thailand.

Starbucks told FOX 23 that the issue had been contributed to human error and that, "the O'Dells should be receiving the checks in the mail any day now."