The Starbucks app is all the stakes of Amazon and Apple writ small

To exist and succeed in this post-capitalist hyper-hell will sometimes require a Grande Pike, and, lord help us, the most convenient way to buy one is through the Starbucks app. You will not wait in line or talk to a person; it is pure, depersonalized consumerism.

I started using the Starbucks app this month. So far, the major consequence has been that I spend a lot more money on Starbucks, even when I don’t want to. It’s good for Starbucks and bad for me — or any consumer who uses the app to order their drinks before setting foot in one of the chain’s stores.

Things start to go wrong when you have to pay for the experience. For whatever reason — Starbucks PR would not tell, though I asked twice — you are forced to “reload” your app’s cash reserves in $5 increments, with a minimum of $10 each time. 

Of course, your Starbucks purchases will rarely if ever end in 0, so you will always have some irritating, not-quite-enough amount of money on your app when you are forced to add $10.

For example, I typically buy either a medium coffee or a “Nitro Cold Brew” ($2.89 and $4.84 respectively).  This morning, I had $2.59 on my card, and I needed to add $10 to order a $2.89 drink in advance — a major overspend just to use the Starbucks app:

This is basically a convenience fee shouldered by the customer in exchange for ordering ahead with the app, and it’s not so different from a credit card minimum at a bodega, at least in practice. Because there are fees associated with this kind of transaction — using the app outside of Starbucks is considered a “card-not-present” payment, which costs more — the merchant tries to minimize them by insisting that you spend a certain amount.

And if I wasn’t lazy, or constantly strapped for time, I wouldn’t need to add $10 over and over again. You can use any remaining balance on your Starbucks app if you’re paying in person — though again, that erases the primary advantage of using the app to begin with.

If this app is theoretically similar to a minimum at a bodega, though, it’s practically quite different (and much scarier). Think about the Starbucks app less in terms of an individual consumer’s choices and more as an example of a trend in online shopping: We’re newly accustomed to linking our finances to corporate systems that make us less inclined to spend our money on diverse options, which could be ruinous down the line.

Apps and sticky traps

This system is very clearly designed to keep you locked into Starbucks, which, more than just a multinational beverage corporation with at least 24,000 stores, is now an ecosystem with a tendril wrapped around your smartphone. 

Even if you aren’t a Starbucks drinker, take a second to consider the greater meaning of this. Though our smartphones are often thought of as tools of liberation — consider MIT’s announcement earlier this year that, with one attachment via the Lightning port, anyone can perform an ultrasound through their iPhone — corporations are now adept at manipulating consumers and siphoning their funds through apps and other digital services. These services deliver convenience, which is a boon in the short term but comes at the long-term cost of choice, and perhaps not just for the individual in question.

Eventually, the companies that are most able to gain marketshare by hooking consumers through products like the Starbucks app will edge closer to monopoly power. Vox reporter Emily Stewart recently explained quite well the worst-case scenario here, with Amazon as an example:

For consumers, this could eventually be bad news. The fewer competitors there are, the more space Amazon gets to control prices, including increasing them if it wants. If you love Amazon now because the things you buy there are so cheap, you might feel differently about it if it’s the only place you can shop for the things you need — and therefore it can charge you whatever it wants.

“Amazon isn’t drawing as much consumer concern now because it delivers such a transformative convenience in shopping,” said Gene Kimmelman, president of the open internet advocacy group Public Knowledge. “This would change if Amazon’s practices become more heavy-handed.”

Less frequently articulated is the role our technology plays in all this. Vox uses the Amazon example because its items are inexpensive, but the convenience is also about friction — or lack thereof. Purchasing from Amazon is extremely easy, or friction-free, because of the ecosystem developed by the company over the course of years. The “1-Click” ordering button, the smartphone app itself, Dash Buttons, even Prime Video are all designed to trap you in Amazon’s universe so that it can take more of your money on a recurring basis. 

Similarly, as noted by Mike Murphy at Quartz, Apple’s profit model now relies on charging people more money for products like the iPhone and providing “services” like an Apple Music subscription. (Previously, it made tons of money simply by shipping buttloads of iPhones.) Apple can do this because its customers are already trapped, either by things like the incredibly sticky iMessage software or the iPhone Upgrade Program, which lets you swap out a half-paid-for iPhone for a new one every year. Once you are in Apple’s mobile universe, it becomes much harder to leave for a competing Android device.

We certainly shouldn’t overlook that O.G. of monopoly villains, Walmart, a chain whose growth is nearly synonymous with the hollowing out of local economies. 

Starbucks’ single app isn’t much of a comparison to the ingenious systems built by Amazon, Apple, or the Waltons, but its feedback loop is even more clear. To buy my $2.89 drink via the app, I needed to add $10 to an existing balance of $2.59, leaving me with $9.70 after my purchase that could only be spent at a Starbucks. Naturally, I spent it, which eventually left me once again with a frustratingly inadequate sum to which I added another $10 — forgetting the old adage of microeconomics to “ignore sunk costs.” 

Of course, many of us make this choice over and over again, as we’re susceptible to convenient options and habitual spending — which is of course what Starbucks, Amazon, and Apple profit from. This often seems fair, because the products are good, but the concern creeps in when you consider that these purchasing decisions will bolster mega corporations that are arguably too powerful as-is. It’s reasonable to expect that the end-point is a kind of archipelago of consumerist monocultures, where Phone™ is an iPhone, Store™ is Amazon, and Coffee™ is Starbucks. Fewer options, perhaps at a higher cost.

Of course, you may want to get comfortable with the idea: As of May, the Starbucks app reportedly had more than 23 million users in the U.S. alone. As of 2016, Starbucks carried $1.2 billion in unused money on its gift-cards and its app — probably in many millions of $2.59.