I keep wondering why people buy Amazon/Netflix Gift cards. Great, you converted 50$ into 50$ that can only be used on Amazon, and people may end up not using at all. This is also financing with negative interest rate.
Starbucks, monetary superpower
31–40 of 141 posts
Re: Starbucks, monetary superpower
#32This is mind blowing. I never thought about this while ordering coffee through Starbucks app. It’s following the same model as Robinhood.
Re: Starbucks, monetary superpower
#3315 or so years ago, my manager at WalMart Stores Information Systems Division was previously a programmer on one of the many finance related teams. Specifically, she worked with gift cards, and one time I asked her how different state laws affected how much money WalMart could recover from those cards. She was delighted to elaborate! I don't recall the particulars of the answer, but it was eye-opening. She said that…
Anything anything involving money is complicated to a fractal degree. I worked on a system to populate data into an large (well-known international) retail site's order database. Representing the simplest possible concept of "this order had no sales tax" took 18 rows across 4 tables. The complexity was due to similar things you point out - the system had to support combinatorically large numbers of cases and even the concept of "nothing" had to be encoded in dozens of different ways.
Re: Starbucks, monetary superpower
#34One use of Starbucks gift cards not mentioned in the article: cashing out foreign currency. "When you’re leaving a foreign country and still have some of the local currency, take it to a Starbucks and load it onto a gift card. You can use the card later in the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, Mexico, and the Republic of Ireland." https://lifehacker.com/put-leftover-foreign-currency-on-a-st...
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Re: Starbucks, monetary superpower
#35One use of Starbucks gift cards not mentioned in the article: cashing out foreign currency. "When you’re leaving a foreign country and still have some of the local currency, take it to a Starbucks and load it onto a gift card. You can use the card later in the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, Mexico, and the Republic of Ireland." https://lifehacker.com/put-leftover-foreign-currency-on-a-st...
So they don't charge any explicit foreign exchange fees, but
"Currency conversions are based on currency exchange rates applicable on the date of the Transaction." Well can't they just use a super advantageous measure there? There's no pinning to any external rate in the language.
Re: Starbucks, monetary superpower
#36I keep wondering why people buy Amazon/Netflix Gift cards. Great, you converted 50$ into 50$ that can only be used on Amazon, and people may end up not using at all. This is also financing with negative interest rate.
It’s super niche, but I have two specific use cases:
- loading an account family members have access to, without linking to the main credit card.
- loading foreign accounts, where small transactions are painful with most cards.
Re: Starbucks, monetary superpower
#3715 or so years ago, my manager at WalMart Stores Information Systems Division was previously a programmer on one of the many finance related teams. Specifically, she worked with gift cards, and one time I asked her how different state laws affected how much money WalMart could recover from those cards. She was delighted to elaborate! I don't recall the particulars of the answer, but it was eye-opening. She said that…
I'm curious if a rules engine [1] could be used instead of implementing the logic in code for something this complicated?
Could fuzzy logic be used to build a case when the laws become contradictory? Maybe after the case is built it could be passed on to legal counsel for approval.
Re: Starbucks, monetary superpower
#38One use of Starbucks gift cards not mentioned in the article: cashing out foreign currency. "When you’re leaving a foreign country and still have some of the local currency, take it to a Starbucks and load it onto a gift card. You can use the card later in the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, Mexico, and the Republic of Ireland." https://lifehacker.com/put-leftover-foreign-currency-on-a-st...
So they don't charge any explicit foreign exchange fees, but "Currency conversions are based on currency exchange rates applicable on the date of the Transaction." Well can't they just use a super advantageous measure there? There's no pinning to any external rate in the language.
yes, they absolutely can. but they don't. They aren't trying to run a forex business, they're trying to sell coffee so they charge a fair rate.
it's not going to be the best rate possible, but it's probably a better rate than anybody else at the airport will give you.
Re: Starbucks, monetary superpower
#39One use of Starbucks gift cards not mentioned in the article: cashing out foreign currency. "When you’re leaving a foreign country and still have some of the local currency, take it to a Starbucks and load it onto a gift card. You can use the card later in the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, Mexico, and the Republic of Ireland." https://lifehacker.com/put-leftover-foreign-currency-on-a-st...
So they don't charge any explicit foreign exchange fees, but "Currency conversions are based on currency exchange rates applicable on the date of the Transaction." Well can't they just use a super advantageous measure there? There's no pinning to any external rate in the language.
Lots of places that do currency exchange don't charge explicit exchange fees, either, they just have different exchange rates for each direction, the “exchange fee” is just (roughly) half the difference.
Re: Starbucks, monetary superpower
#40Just today, I uncovered an old gift card from a dept store called Rich's, which apparently became part of Macy's. I have no idea how old the card is, but it has a year 2000 logo on it.
The card has a 800 number on it to check its status. So I called it and entered the card number. It was unrecognized. :-(
It was probably a $50 holiday gift to me at some point.
I wonder whose pocket that money ended up in?
What a racket gift cards are.