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« Starbucks Opens Up Free Wi-Fi to Cardholders | Main | Wee-Fi: Caribou Roams Free; Nintendo DS Loses Free Wi-Fi; OK Wi-Fi Network A-OK »
Starbucks, AT&T biff day one of the card loyalty program: After several hours of occasional attempts to register my Starbucks Card (actually, two) with the company for free Wi-Fi and other rewards, seeing “Service Unavailable,” long delays, errors, and a general failure to accept my card—now there’s a message. “Due to overwhelming interest in Card Rewards we are currently experiencing difficulty accessing Starbucks Cards accounts. We are working to fix the problem and ask that you please try again later.”
(Update: A Starbucks spokesperson called me in the late afternoon to let me know the site was back up and running. They had an excess of interest, shall we say. I checked: the site is working and I was able to register quickly and without a hitch.)
The Card Rewards program allows anyone with a Starbucks Card to register it with Starbucks for freebies, including Wi-Fi. There’s an interesting choice (when it worked) where you can select whether to have freebies like free exotic milk options or brewed coffee refills by themselves or with Wi-Fi on top. If you choose Wi-Fi, you’re redirected to SBC servers (for nostalgia’s sake), at which point everything seems to fall apart.
Trying two separate cards, I was unable to set up an account and get the cards to take. The errors weren’t clearly spelled out. Clearly, the system was neither designed to handle demand, nor designed to fail gracefully, blocking users until capacity was available.
For loyal Starbucks patrons, this doesn’t come across very well at all.
[Photo by Matt Davis. Used under Creative Commons license.]
Posted by Glennf at June 3, 2008 1:34 PM
Categories: Cluelessness, Free, Hot Spot
Glenn -
I went to a store today and didn't see any way to even enter my card. Is the t-mobile SSID or the attwifi SSID or something else entirely.
Predictably, the five workers there had nary a clue about any of it.
[Editor's note: Turns out you must register your card, at which point you create an account that works on the AT&T network-gf]
Posted by: Double D at June 3, 2008 8:37 PM
I finally managed to get my account registered, and I've just wandered over to the Starbucks here and logged in using Devicescape (add the account as user@attwifi.com with your Starbucks password).
Next test is to see whether I can log in at another location within the 2 hours, or if it is limited to 2 hours at a single location.
Posted by: John at June 3, 2008 4:46 PM
You know, it's not uncommon for me to wait 30 seconds or longer when connecting through AT&T at McDonald's and Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf.
This has been going on for months.
At first, I thought it might be a problem with a particular location. But after seeing it happen at many locations over a fairly broad swath of California, I began thinking capacity issues with AT&T's AAA system.
It looks like opening it up to gift card-toting Starbucks customers (not to mention all the new Starbucks locations coming online) pushed it over the edge!
Oh well, it looks like they're at least aware of the issue now!
Posted by: Jeff from Knowzy at June 3, 2008 4:16 PM
Geez, what a perfect example of why big telco will never deliver the 'starbux experience'.
Posted by: Eric at June 3, 2008 2:27 PM