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Starbucks Partners With Square
Square, the start-up mobile payment service that aims to bring credit card transactions to anyone with a smartphone, has formed a partnership with Starbucks, a move that vastly increases Square's reach and visibility. According to the NY Times,
"This fall, Square will begin processing all credit and debit card transactions at Starbucks stores in the United States and eventually customers will be able to order a grande vanilla latte and charge it to their credit cards simply by saying their names. Though smartphone payments have a long way to go before they replace wallets altogether, Starbucks’s adoption of Square will catapult the start-up’s technology onto street corners nationwide, and is the clearest sign yet that mobile payments could become mainstream. ... At first, Starbucks customers will need to show the merchant a bar code on their phones. But when Starbucks uses Square’s full GPS technology, the customer’s phone will automatically notify the store that the customer has entered, and the customer’s name and photo will pop up on the cashier’s screen. The customer will give the merchant his or her name, Starbucks will match the photo and the payment will be complete."
Mediocrity loves company.
"Uh, yeah, I'll have a double Crono frappuccino and a venti Cloud -- be sure to leave room for Chocobo."
My work here is dung.
If they can track customers as they walk in the door, why even have a line at the cashier? You walk in the door, you get a push notification to confirm or change your standing order on your phone, and then you take a seat. Once your drink is ready, you get another notification, go to the pickup counter where they confirm your photo and give you your drink.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
I am quite uneasy about all this gps tracking and logging which is going on these days?
Sure it's just a coffee in this case but do you really want everything logged and recorded?
How long before your inbox is getting spammed with we notice you haven't been in starbucks for a while here's a voucher to super size your coffee on your next visit. Should there be records of your movements associations and purchases.
Facebook has gotten ever more intrusive, especially with timeline they are recording where you go and who you meet up with.
Your smartphone will tag your location with gps when you take a photo in the exif information (firefox has an extension to read the exif and locate it on a map for you). I noticed facebook strips the exif data from photographs but facebook is still likely to retain it for their own purposes and of course facebook will turn over everything it has to the Police should they so request.
I'm all for using technology when it is useful to the user, but this constant casual surveillance is beginning to get more than a little creepy. You don't have to live in Syria to find a goverment who will use technology against you given the opportunity.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Square? You mean the purveyors of the butter-slice sized "I-can't-believe-it's-PCI-compliant!" (tm) mobile payment system? The first time I had some hipster process my card with his iPhone, I was apalled that there was a system that *can't* issue a physical receipt. I know, I know, most people swipe their cards and wave off the receipt, taking it on faith that the merchant will charge only the amount shown on the till and not a little more... or the maximum I just authorized with the card-present swipe. If the charge is off, you have no proof, no way of coming back, nothing at all.
Oh sure, I can stand there for another 2-3min while I ask said hipster to email or text me a "receipt" (at least it has a transaction number) usually accompanied with a lot of huffing and puffing about how giving me a receipt is a hassle and why do I want one anyway....? Because I just did the electronic equivalent of laying my wallet on the counter and saying "Take what you need." I'd like some acknowledgement of what was taken. Is that such a burden? I still write a few checks for bills and such so there are multiple transaction types debited against a single account, and I like to reconcile payments and balance my account periodically like a grownup.
I might slide more easily into the paperless future if the rate of "error" (not really) wasn't going up. Even in my run-o-the-mill consumer usage, I've had a few instances in the past year where a person (a local drive-up barista, a dude selling t-shirts at Comicon, etc) where there was a discrepancy between what I was told and what was punched in. It's never in my favor, and if I didn't catch it in tiny print on a smudgy screen before faux-signing with my finger... And when I ask for a receipt -- even a text pseudo-receipt -- they got all flustered, and one even refused (that was the one who'd added an even two dollars). Persoanlly, if you're that hard up to steal a buck from me, you can have it. But that doesn't mean it's right.
All of a sudden this older type of "skimming" is coming back into vogue, something that I haven't seen since... well, ever in my lifetime. My parents used to talk about deli guys with a finger on the scale, and cashiers with pennies on the counter to count how many dollars in the till they'd lifted from customers (so they could balance the till by pocketing the right amt of cash at the end of the day), but I thought they were funny old-people stories. Any now Square comes along with a magical box that re-enables a petty crime by depricating auth logs... and few people seem to give a crap.
Everything old is new again.
I think not...(*poof*)
These days, I'm going more and more back to trying to do only cash transactions for daily needs (groceries, eat out....etc). I really am not a fan of giving up my purchasing patterns to all these corporations just so they can try to sell me more or sell me crap I don't want or need.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........