The Franklin Reporter & Advocate Eight Villages, One Community
Customers at the Cedar Grove Center Starbucks were greeted by an unusual sign on October 13 and 14; one warning them about the water in the store.
“Do not trust our water,” the sign began. “Please do not order any products that use water. Our water is no longer filtered but management is forcing us to stay open and to stay silent.”
Tom Torre, the shift manager on October 14, said he and his fellow employees refused to stay silent.
An identical sign was placed on the counter where orders are taken.
The problem began early on October 13 when, Torre said, the store’s water filtration system “kind of exploded,” resulting in water leaking onto the floor.
But it wasn’t just the leaking water that alarmed employees, Torre said, It was how the water looked.
“It was yellowish,” he said. “There were little, almost like granular beads in there. We couldn’t tell exactly what it was, but it was completely discolored and there was something very clearly wrong with it.”
“It was leaking a bunch of sediment into all of our water,” he said.
The store was closed for several hours and technicians were brought in, but they could not fix the problem, Torre said. They flushed the system, but the sediment remained, he said.
“The water was still very funky,” he said. “Even after they flushed it the first time and we started running it again, the granular beads were still in there and it tasted weird. It left kind of like a both salty and soapy taste.”
Compounding the problem, Torre said, was the insistence by corporate management that the store remain open, and that employees not say anything about the water.
“And me and my manager too, we’re like, yeah, we should not open, but the higher ups said, open and serve people, pretend like everything’s fine. It’s cool,” Torre said.
A call was made to the district manager, but that was fruitless, he said.
“The district manager was unresponsive, so we contacted a secondary person to try to talk to,” he said. “They suggested we just open up anyway once the water was flushed, even though the technician gave us no okay to open. He said he didn’t know whether we should open or not.”
That secondary contact, Torre said, told employees that a Google search showed that Franklin Township water was safe to drink, “so you guys just open back up.”
“They didn’t want us to say anything,” he said. “They were just, you know, serve customers like normal. And that didn’t sit right with me or any of the baristas, so we’re trying to just at least warn people and let them know.”
More technicians attempted to fix the problem on October 14, but to no avail, Torre said.
“All the sediment came back in, the little pieces or whatever that’s in the water came back in, clogged up all the lines again,” he said.
Two of the three technicians, he said, said they should not open up, but one technicians said it would be OK.
Torre said that surprisingly, they’ve received no customer complaints from those who ignored the signs.
“I could be overreacting on my part, but I just feel like it’s right to let people know that there is something wrong with our water,” he said.
Torre said the staff is using bottled water and cold brew to make coffee – needed because the coffee machine is clogged – and that the cold brew was made before the water system’s problem surfaced.
“We’re still serving the espresso,” he said. “I personally don’t feel comfortable with it. Nobody has complained about it, and people say that it has drained itself out enough. They ran calibration earlier this morning, so all that sediment should be out of there.”
“I personally just for safety reasons just wouldn’t recommend it,” Torre said. “I tell every customer to avoid it.”
The store, along with the rest of Cedar Grove Plaza, will be shut for a while on October 15 while the plaza’s fire suppression system is worked on, Torre said.
He said the water filtration system will probably be replaced on October 16, possibly necessitating another closure.
Requests for comment via email and voice message were not immediately returned October 14 by Starbucks officials.
