Starbucks Ends 'Jonathan's Card' Social Experiment

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

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What started off as a simple iOS experiment in human nature and Starbucks’ digital procedures was ended on Friday by Starbucks due to violation of its TOS. Jonathan Stark, a developer made an image of his gift card available to anyone to use.

He found out that a screenshot of the app worked just like the real deal at the register. He posted his card details online and encouraged people to use it and deposit money when the account got low.
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Was thinking about this. Every single person that used this "Community" Gift Card has a iPhone and was paying for their iPhone service which in no way is cheap. So if they were using this card they owned a multi-hundred dollar phone plus pay around 99.99 a month for their service. This seems like a kind and friendly ideal but not a single user of this gift card really needed it to pay for a cup of coffee if they had that much money to begin with.
 
Evil said:
Was thinking about this. Every single person that used this "Community" Gift Card has a iPhone and was paying for their iPhone service which in no way is cheap. So if they were using this card they owned a multi-hundred dollar phone plus pay around 99.99 a month for their service. This seems like a kind and friendly ideal but not a single user of this gift card really needed it to pay for a cup of coffee if they had that much money to begin with.
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And they're using the card to purchase a $9 coffee.
 
Evil said:
Was thinking about this. Every single person that used this "Community" Gift Card has a iPhone and was paying for their iPhone service which in no way is cheap. So if they were using this card they owned a multi-hundred dollar phone plus pay around 99.99 a month for their service. This seems like a kind and friendly ideal but not a single user of this gift card really needed it to pay for a cup of coffee if they had that much money to begin with.
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Well, there's Sam Odio's own take on the experiment where he'd siphon money off into his own gift card once the balance got to a certain amount.

As he said: "Since I don't find the idea of yuppies buying yuppies coffees very interesting I decided to mix things up a bit." (note: he's a self-proclaimed yuppie) This was interesting to yuppies with eyephones who frequent Starbucks, but not really that interesting as a social experiment. I think Starbucks could do good business by creating a new type of gift card that works like this. Starbucks has been the big winners from this social (corporate/consumer) experiment.
 
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