What a fluff article.
You would think they have traction and tons of merchants on board. They don't.
Do a location search. Zoom out the map on http://www.fivestarscard.com/locations
There are only locations in Silicon Valley, Los Angeles and literally a smattering of other places.
Then there is this statement:
"Since officially launching in 2011, FiveStars has signed up 400,000 customers across 11 states; those customers have purchased 3.5 million items and are on track to spend more than $50 million at participating locations this year — those same customers are earning about $100,000 in free rewards every month."
But when speaking of the competitor, Level Up and Belly, it says this:
"A similar service, called LevelUp, claims to have about 200,000 active users, who are spending some $2 million a month on its network. And Chicago-based Belly, which has an iPad solution, recently claimed to have 1,400 merchants and more than 200,000 active users."
Why is Five Stars numbers referred to differently than the others whose numbers are "claimed" throwing doubt on those numbers. Aren't the Five Stars numbers also "claimed". Or are we to believe they were independently verified?
And lastly, from the Press release (repeated on allthingsd) "FiveStars cards are currently available at leading retailers and local merchants across the country."
Not true. It's not available "across the country" and "leading retailers" is certainly a stretch.
