How to get Jonathan Stark (and Starbucks) to buy you an iPad
Jonathan Stark recently released his Starbucks card to the public as a social experiment. It was quickly picked up by CNN, Time, and many others. For those of you who are living under a rock, here's what is going on: anyone can donate to the card and anyone is welcome to use the card. Just walk up to a Starbucks counter and show them this image.
Jonathan purportedly did this to understand more about online society. Would there be a balance on the card? Would anyone care? Jonathan himself has put over $100 on the card to get things started. Some have argued in disbelief that this must be some sort of Starbucks viral campaign, though Jonathan denies it.
Since I don't find the idea of yuppies buying yuppies coffees very interesting I decided to mix things up a bit. I coded up a script that would alert me whenever the card balance reached a certain threshold (github). And here's the twist: for the last week I (and others) have been using this script to transfer donated money off Jonathan's card and onto our own Starbucks gift cards. It's easy: just head to your local starbucks, pop open your computer, run this script, and when the music plays, cash in. Through this strategy I've personally netted $625 by spending less than 5 hours at Starbucks. That's enough for an iPad.
