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Jonathan's Card

jonathanstark.com

71–80 of 232 posts

Re: Jonathan's Card

#74

> Plus, it’s actually kinda fun to see those rewards stars drop into my in-app coffee cup. Well, Jonathan may get the Rewards so it is not completely altruistic. A real-time map of where transactions have been made ala http://twittervision.com might be interesting if this card goes viral https://www.starbucks.com/card/rewards

Jonathan here: Yes, unfortunately I do get the rewards. I get a free coffee for every 15 purchased. I figured that the free coffees would accrue to the card itself and therefore every 16th person would get a free coffee. As it turns out, sbux mails free coffee coupons to me: http://yfrog.com/keup3hxj I'm not sure how to redistribute them fairly, but I was thinking that I could at least pass them out at my local store…

Use them to buy your own coffees and whenever you do, add the value of the coffee to the card?

Re: Jonathan's Card

#75
post #26

Hmm, I think posting the value of the card affects the data points. I understand why it needs to be done, but my thinking is that if nobody knows how much is on there it leaves it less prone to outright abuse. If the card suddenly gets a $100 recharge I'm sure it will be abused a lot more. Maybe that's part of the experiment, but I'd like to see what people do in general without that knowledge. EDIT: or maybe even ju…

Jonathan here: I've been thinking about this quite a bit. One the one hand, last week some jerk saw a $50 balance and spent the whole thing in one shot. On the other hand, people need to know when there is money on the card if they are thinking about walking down to a sbux to get a coffee. I might try the "there's more than $10 on the card right now". I've also experimented with delaying the reloaded messages, and do…

Out of curiosity, every 15 coffees people buy, does Starbucks send you a coupon for a free drink in the mail?

Re: Jonathan's Card

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying with CC from outside the US works.

Hm, I didn't feel like giving *$ my email. But now that I tried it it says: "Please select a state or province." (I cant find anything in this list that is not US/Can) and "Please enter a ZIP Code at least 5 characters long" (we just have 4 digits). They just don't want my money..

I'm in Australia, I just chose armed forces pacific and added a leading 0 to my zip code. A bit dodgy but it worked

Re: Jonathan's Card

#79
post #4

Whenever I go through a toll bridge, I frequently pay the toll of the person behind me. I've sometimes wondered if it propagates backward at all. For the Starbucks card, I would love to live in a society where this could work. Unfortunately it's one of those things where one anonymous bad egg will ruin (i.e., drain the account) for everyone else. Some way to restrict it to a community with less anonymity would help (…

> I frequently pay the toll of the person behind me In what country/state/city? Is that legal? In most (all?) US cities, it is illegal to fill other peoples' parking meters because that robs the city of fines. But maybe it's not a concern for tolls? > I've sometimes wondered if it propagates backward at all. At most, it would only reach exactly the car behind you. If that driver decides to pay the toll anyway (or the…

Whoa. That's odd. I think it should be illegal for the government to rely / depend on illegal behavior to make money. Otherwise, it seems like a conflict of interest in that there is no incentive to tackle the root cause of crime anymore.

Re: Jonathan's Card

#80
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jonathan here: I've been thinking about this quite a bit. One the one hand, last week some jerk saw a $50 balance and spent the whole thing in one shot. On the other hand, people need to know when there is money on the card if they are thinking about walking down to a sbux to get a coffee. I might try the "there's more than $10 on the card right now". I've also experimented with delaying the reloaded messages, and do…

What about requiring interaction from purchaser. Require a photo of the purchase. It would add a level of social obligation. You could go further and require a tweet explaining the purchase. You could even add a little homily about good manners and not being greedy to the explanatory text. I think you are doing a very interesting experiment with new financial entities, and I'm curious to see where this leads.

The homily sounds like a good idea; that's been shown to actually deter some in the past.

To the other points: how would you go about mandating a photo or any other form of interaction from the purchaser? Jonathan has his card picture posted on the website–Starbucks simply accepts that photo as payment, there's no authorization process in the middle where Jonathan could selectively let some use it while disallowing others.

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