I’ve had the new Starbucks Gold card for a few weeks now and alot of people have been asking me what I think about it and how I got in. I figured a blog entry would be good to catch people up and since I have been in charge or a rewards program before, maybe I can add a few tips for Starbucks.

I was invited into the program early, before it was open to the public, and for free. Great! I love being an early adopter, I love Starbucks, and I’m not going to lie, I like being “that guy” who the baristas say “Ohh, this is a Gold Card.”

After using the card for a few weeks I wanted to give some early feedback, and maybe some information for anybody that is thinking about buying one when they become available November 4th. Starbucks, if you want to hire me for these insights, feel free. :)

Previously to being invited to join the Starbucks Gold Card program I had been a registered Starbucks Card holder since they started giving you free syrups and milks and had been using a Starbucks Card for much longer than that. In fact I have been using the Ichiro card that came out over three years ago until I got the new, slick looking, Gold Card. All that being said, yes, I go to Starbucks a good amount.

So what does the Starbucks Gold card get you? So far it has gotten me 10% off my drinks and food. They say there will be other benefits given online over time, but I haven’t seen anything in the past few weeks. You get 10% off of other products as well and a free drink on your birthday.

Over the last few weeks I have probably earned 2 free drinks (based on saving 10% a drink). To make things easy, let’s say I buy a grande Americano everyday (which I don’t, although I do buy Americanos not the expensive drinks). That would cost me apx. $890 over the year, and with the Starbucks Gold card I would save apx. $89, or roughly 36 free grande Americanos. That’s quite the savings if you ask me, and for a free card (or even a $25 card) it is well worth it. Factor in buying for other people, snacks, gifts, and you could be making back 10X your investment fairly quickly. Sounds great, it is…but is it could easily be better.

Here are the knocks I have with the card;

1. You don’t get refills, even though it is a registered card.
2. You don’t get free Soy or Syrups, even if you have registered the card.

I guess those are the only two knocks that I have on the Gold card, but trying to be an elite or somewhat exclusive program they should take care of these benefits that they already offer to other “registered” card holders.

What does this mean on your bottom line? If you buy Soy drinks of any size, get coffee refills, or buy tall or short drinks with syrups the registered card, as opposed to the Gold Card, is actually is a better deal.  For me, being an Americano drinker who likes refills it has actually led to me having to carry two Starbucks cards. To save money on the Americano I use the Gold Card, then when it’s time for my refill I use the registered card. You can call me cheap if you’d like, but if you know me you know it comes down to the principal of the program and the benefits.

Why doesn’t Starbucks just let the registered Gold Card members get free syrups, milk upgrades, and of course the refills?  Obviously the Gold Card members are loyal and with the special invites going out Starbucks wants these card carriers them feel valued.  Not taking care off these small details will hurt the overall experience for those who buy the Gold Card and make them question if they should join, or if joining was the right choice.

Overall I love the program, but would love these small changes made.  Not only to save me the hassle and the money but to also make me, as a Gold Card member, feel just that much more exclusive than I was as a regular “registered” Starbucks Card holder.

Brad Steven’s giving Starbucks Ideas a sneak peek

OKTV Episode 12

OKTV Episode 11

iPhone 3G will MAKE YOU MONEY.

So as has been pointed out by a commenter’s (”the vis”) on a previous video, the iPhone 3G will actually cost more over 2 years than the original iPhone’s. The math goes like this, $399 for the original 8GB iPhone +$20/mo for the data plan (on top of your voice plan)= $879. The new iPhone 3G (8GB version) will retail for $199 (half the price) but will cost $30/mo for the data plan= $919 (I won’t tell you that to get 500 text messages a month it will be an additional $5/month as that will go against my argument.. wait I just wrote that, whoops).

So we’re looking at the new iPhone 3G costing $40 more than the current iPhone and much more than a baseline cell phone. So the question posed by “the vis” was, is there a way the new iPhone can pay for itself over the two years of your contract? I don’t think you can have the iPhone “pay for itself over two years, but I do think that there will be some great ways of saving money over the two years you have your new iPhone 3G, and let’s just see how much money we could potentially save with the new iPhone.

Free GPS
I feel that I know the city of Seattle fairly well, and that at most I may need to go onto google maps to figure out where something is located in Seattle. However, if last Christmas proved anything, people love in car GPS units (along with digital picture frames, which I guess you could use your iPhone for as well). When you’re in an unfamiliar city, is there anything better than having someone guide you, turn by turn, through directions. Well the new iPhone should be able to do that with it’s GPS. The savings right there is apx $150 if you were to buy a new one on sale, and $10/day for each day you may rent a car on vacation. Let’s call this a savings of $200 over two years.

Location Based To-Do Lists
Omnidrive will be offering location based to-do lists on the new iPhone, and so as “the vis” suggested, this will dramitically cut down on the ammount of gas you use running your errands. One of the main ways people are suggesting saving money with today’s high gas prices is to make all your errands in one run. Rather than taking many short runs, making one big loop will save you much more time, mileage, and money. Omnidrive’s location based to-do list will help guide these errands, and make sure that you remember what to do, and also show you the closest place to take care of each task. Very cool and if you figure it can save you even 10 miles a week, that is 1000 miles over 2 years, at $4/gal. and to make it easy on the math let’s say you get 25mi./gal that adds up to $160 over two years.

GPS traffic maps
Google offers traffic maps for their mobile maps, and although you can access these maps on other phones, the iPhone will make these maps much more accessible and much more widely distributed (at least I hope that they will). As Minneapolis has shown us, idling your car for even three minutes will kill the earth, and also cost you money. Something like half a gallon of gas per hour. With these mobile traffic maps you’ll be able to see what roads are backed up with traffic and avoid many hours of being stuck in traffic. So, if you’re able to avoid even 11 minutes of traffic a week, you’re looking at saving 1200 minutes over two years, which would be another $40 in savings.

Scanned Membership Cards
Lifehacker layed out a great idea for how to carry many store membership and reward cards with you by scanning them, saving them as a picture on your iPhone, and then presenting them to get your savings at your local store. Rather than having to worry about holding onto all of these cards, and packing them all in your wallet for every trip out of the house, just take your iPhone and present your scanned card. I recently went on a trip to California, and was able to signup for a Ralph’s card to save $15 in a single shopping trip. I have no idea where this card is, and won’t use it again, unless I were to signup for yet another card to save $10 or more on my next trip to California. If you didn’t want to take the time to signup for the card more than once, you’d be able to save say $50 a year on club cards that you don’t normally carry with you per year. Over two years that’s another $100 in savings.

Coupons and Special offers from Location Based ads
Through Loopt, Whrrl, Brightkite, as I talked about in a recent video, I expect that we will start recieiving special offers for restaurants and stores that will be of more interest to us. Based on our location and our friends recommendations and behavior we will get much more targeted offers that will bring more value than today’s google adwords ads. If you get an offer for a free appetizer or drink and use the offer every other week, that could be $ every other week, would be about $400 in savings over two years!

Having the same phone for 2 years
Most people get a new cell phone every 18 months. Since the iPhone is so revolutionary, it will be a much easier phone to hold onto for the extra 6 months than your run of the mil Motorola phone. Yes , there will be a new iPhone out before the two year contract is up, but it still won’t be a necessity to buy as, the 3rd generation iPhone will probably only add a better camera, video conferencing, and maybe some new colors. Holding onto a phone for 6 months will save you the equivalent of $20 in that amount of time.

Add up all of those costs and you have saved $920 over two years! Actually giving you an extra $1 over the course of two years! Yes, the iPhone will pay for itself through the amount of money it saves you. It’s just like Steve Jobs is paying you $1 to use the iPhone!

Yes, I know these are stretches, but it was a fun list to put together and it does show that the iPhone will actually be able to help you save money over the life of it’s contract, even if it’s not THIS much.

So everyone, does this math make you want to get to your nearest Apple Store or ATT store come July 11th? I’ll see you all there.

Not my favorite episode, but wanted to get a little WWDC talk out there before it happened. Please come back for more (better) epiodes in the future.

A sign from the Willowbrook Starbucks in Houston, TX.

Starbucks finally listened to me!*

Back on December 12 of last yearI wrote a piece in response to an Ad Age article that was sent to me by faithful commenter TD. As I said at the time, I think Starbucks should offer a happy hour. It would help their stock bounce back as it would lure a new audience at a slow time of their business. Simply offer discounted drinks from 5-6:30 to get people to stop by Starbucks rather than a bar to catch up after work and before dinner.

Well, last week “kyle” commented on that post saying that there is a store in Houston that is offering a happy hour of kinds.

“This just in… There is one Starbucks in Houston actually doing a happy hour. I know this to be true, because I work at it. In the Northwest Part of Houston, in the Willowbrook area Starbucks has Happy Hour between 5pm-7pm EVERYDAY (yes Sat and Sun, too). All Frappuccinos are 50% off!
Address 7606 FM 1960W Houston TX 77070″

Luckily, a good friend of mine, and fellow Starbuck’s fan lives in Houston and was able to go check out what “kyle” had reported on this here site. For the full report checkout Lach’s post here. As Lach did some investigative reporting this is brief report on if this was a test market, or what was going on with this new Starbucks happy hour.

“The employees working there said it was this store only, and not a push from corporate. They just printed the signs and started selling half off frapps during happy hour that Monday. They did seem nervous about all my questions, but they should be. The Mother Ship will not be pleased. They run a tight ship and don’t generally give stores flexibility over pricing.”

Well, we’ll see how long THAT happy hour lasts. I doubt that the Starbucks Support Center will be a fan of hearing about a rouge Starbucks offering half price drinks. I bet it’s working out well for “Frap” sales as well as overall store sales, but unless they have phenomenal numbers, I have a feeling this is going to go the way of the Iced Coffee’s in stores.

Thanks for the tip kyle and the follow up Lach! Howard, please bring this offer to the masses!

*Starbucks probably did not listen to me in particular.