This complaint about bad design is about baked goods: namely, the range of mini-cakes, whoopie pies, and cake pops released in spring 2011 by Starbucks.
Now don’t get me wrong: I love cake like a fat kid loves…well, you know. But my complaint isn’t so much about the cakes (and definitely not the salted caramel pecan bar, you delicious little minx) as it is the way the pricing offer attached to the cakes has ended up being deployed.
If you’re not as much of a gleefully pre-diabetic snacker as I am, here’s a primer: if you buy one item from the Petites range, you pay £1.30 for the privilege. If you buy more than one, though, the price goes down accordingly: two for £2.30, or six for £6.00. Again, no complaints from me here. However, there is one fatal flaw to this offer, and it’s how the discount is calculated at the register—or, rather, how it’s not calculated. Most Starbucks discounts are put through automatically: the register recognises you’ve bought something that comes with a discount and instantly recalculates the total. So, for example, if I buy a soy latte with an extra shot, the price goes up a bit because of those two extras; when I pay with a Starbucks card (which gives you those extras for free), the register recognises what I’m paying with and the price automatically drops back down. But when you buy two Petites cakes, the register doesn’t recognise that there’s a discount attached to them; instead, the person working the register has to notice what you’ve purchased, remember that there’s a discount for volume, and manually enter in the lower price. You can guess how often this happens, and how often I am instead the jerk holding up the queue arguing for a 30p refund.
It’s also probably pretty easy to guess how something like this could happen—the marketing team that came up with the discount campaign is totally unconnected to the facilities team or whoever it is responsible for any alterations to the cash registers. And it’s also easy to guess that Starbucks’ usability and user design team isn’t responsible for store equipment like the cash registers. I’d argue, however, that they should be, at least to the extent of recognising when a promotion or new feature (a new cake release, as it were) is going to be inconsistent with how things work. In the meantime, I’m afraid my cake-user experience is suffering.