Isn’t this like the whole point of gift cards etc.
They already have your money and they hope you don’t spend it.
In a former life, I sold point of sale (POS) machines. We got bonuses for selling stuff like gift card add ons and the number one selling point to retailers was that some significant percentage of cards are never redeemed at all.
A decade ago, I worked on POS systems as a software engineer.
The selling point was absolutely hawking gift cards. Since we saw the data from companies, and we had a clause that gift cards expired (before the government stepped in) I remember being blown away by how many millions it was in pure profit.
Gift cards. Bleh
I have been actively fighting gift cards in my family by giving cash. I’m all, it’s like a gift card but you can spend it anywhere! I took awhile, but little got into it.
I represent that demographic.
I get gift cards given to me, and put them in my wallet with the best intention of using them, then after 5 years I clean out my wallet and find them. And where I live they don’t expire, so I put them back into my wallet so I can not use them for another 5 years.
This sounds like bullshit. When your card empties you can pay the rest with a credit card or cash. Starbucks doesn’t force you to reload a card, or use the card for the entire transaction price. You can even move your gift card balance to the app to consolidate multiple gift cards if you have trouble keeping up with multiple cards.
When I use the app it forces me to reload my balance, I can’t just pay what is owed. I support this investigation. Starbucks is basically forcing you to always leave a portion of unspent money on in your “Starbucks” account.
This is not my experience with the app. When the balance on my card runs out, they tell me, “it says you still owe x” and then I can pay that with a credit card.
Edit: I’m specifically talking about using the app to pay at the counter though, not to order ahead.
And yet they still claimed an average of $180,000,000 a year the past 5 years that people didn’t spend.
I’m with you this is something Starbucks probably doesn’t engineer, it’s just people being dumb.
It’s definitely a dark pattern built into the app / gift card experience.
Kind of. The app doesn’t in any way tell you that you can use the card balance to pay part of your bill and then use a credit card for the rest; I only found out when a barista told me
Does this include people that just use their Starbucks cards for frequent purchases? I always have up to $25 on my card for the one or two times a week I get something. That is just money I haven’t spent yet, and I’m fully aware that I could just use it up if I stopped going to Starbucks.
Well… as someone who thinks he spends more money at Starbucks than is smart I’d go as far to say anyone going there is a little dumb lol
Nice people
What a bizarre story.
What a stupid, utter fucking waste of everyone’s time. Absolute worthless suit with no merit.
