Starbucks Rewards Is Economical

I gotta admit that Starbucks has done a good job of finetuning its Starbucks Rewards program to its advantage. Of course, we all should have expected it over the years. As more and more of the public got caffeine-addicted, Starbucks gradually tightened their loyalty program. Now the siren has your credit card number stored (probably set to auto reload your gold card), and you making mobile orders without thinking of the (unseen) money being transacted.

In the early Rewards days, bonus stars were easy to accumulate. Remember the days when even loading up your rewards card using your credit card gave you a star? Of course that led to the abuse where large orders were split into many individual orders resulting in a bunch of stars.

And now we’re here where stars are based on amount spent. While seemingly fair for those spending a lot per transaction, it really has limited my personal star collection. Since the new Rewards program started on April 12, 2016, I have yet to accumulate enough stars for one free drink. I’m pretty sure I would have had a freebie by now with the former Rewards program.

Oh well. That’s how economical Starbucks Rewards has become.