Earlier this year Starbucks and Square announced a partnership where Starbucks would allow customers to use Square Wallet to purchase beverages and food items. Today, multiple Starbucks locations across the United States have finally started to support the service, although Starbucks won’t be using the the traditional Square Wallet payment method.
If you’re unaware, you normally carry out a transaction with Square Wallet by opening a “tab” and telling the merchant your name after you make a purchase. The Square Wallet mobile app will use GPS to verify that you’re in the store and will charge your credit or debit card that is linked to your Square Wallet account for the items purchased. This is really convenient because there’s no need to scan your phone at the register; however, Starbucks has decided that it will still be mandatory to scan a QR code generated by Square Wallet when making a purchase.
So, if you still have to scan your phone at the register, why not use Starbucks’ mobile app, which has been available for years? That’s simple, really. With Square Wallet you don’t have to have a previously registered Starbucks gift card linked to your phone before making a purchase. Your purchase is automatically charged to your debit or credit card.
We’ve embedded Starbucks’ full statement on Square Wallet below:
We look forward to continuing to create amazing connections with our customers – both in our stores and outside of our stores and offering our customers choices in how they want to pay. Starbucks was the first national retailer to offer its own mobile payment technology combined with a world-class loyalty program in January 2011, and we have seen a tremendous response from our customers with more than 100 million mobile transactions occurring in our U.S. stores since its launch. Starbucks believes in the values and vision of Square, and just three months after announcing our partnership with Square, we are thrilled to make the convenience of paying with the Square Wallet app available to our customers starting today.
Thing is, at this point, why would you use anything other than the Starbucks app or Passbook? You get the same convenience and you don’t even have to do anything like add a new account or service to your payment process.
