Starbucks on Wednesday announced the national rollout of a mobile payment system that works with iPhones, iPod touches and select BlackBerry devices. The system works at 6,800 company-operated Starbucks locations and more than 1,000 Starbucks located in Target stores throughout the US.
[ad#Google Adsense 300×250 in story]It’s designed to speed the process of paying for your order, according to Starbucks. It works via a free app you can download through the App Store; the app is tied to the Starbucks Card many Starbucks patrons use to pay for their coffee.
The system has been test-marketed in Seattle, Northern California, New York and in Starbucks at Target stores. Now it’s ready for nationwide deployment, Starbucks reports.
Starbucks reports that more than one-third of their US customers use a smartphone, the majority of which are iOS or BlackBerry devices (an Android app is also on the way, though no release date was announced). What’s more, 20 percent of Starbucks transactions are made using a Starbucks Card. As many of those customers use their phones in line, combining the two systems seemed like a natural for the company.
The process works by generating a barcode on your mobile device’s screen that’s read by a scanner on the countertop.
I wonder what will happen when they are slow? Will employees still force you to use the app or will they take your order like normal. I hope common sense will prevail, but I doubt it.
I foresee parents and kids complaining about this. Parent: My kids spent way to much on Starbucks. Kid: I lost my iPhone and now the thieves spent way to much on Starbucks.
Seems redundant to me. Is it so hard to pull out your Starbuck card? Or your debit card. Seems to be a solution in search of a problem.
Cool! You can expect anything these days……
Starbucks sees it differently.
As I mentioned in the story, Starbucks sees 20 percent of their customers using a Starbucks card to pay for their drinks; Starbucks recognizes another 33 percent of their customers as smartphone users, and of those, 75 percent are using iPhones or BlackBerries (I left that last part out because it’s just a lot of numbers to throw at the reader).
So the company sees a lot of people both using smartphones and using their Starbucks cards to pay for drinks; it’s natural to assume there’s overlap there.
What’s more, this isn’t new – the software’s been available on the App Store for months, and they’ve been test-marketing the capability in a big chunk of some of their highest-volume territory.
So clearly Starbucks itself has seen enough positive results with that effort to proceed with a nationwide rollout.
And the way they see it is what matters for them. And like you say, they have to have seen enough positive results to sink in more capital into the program. I still don’t see it, but again, that’s why I’m not running Starbucks. Among others. 🙂
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