This month’s focus is bills, bills, bills.
But first, I was just listening to an episode of this podcast about the first ever Starbucks at at the end, one of the hosts said the following and I found it so interesting!
They also have a significant revenue now that’s nothing to do with coffee… There’s a really good argument to be made that Starbucks functions as a bank. And that’s because of its customer gift cards and store cards.
People will gift gift cards to their friends, but they will also load money onto their store card—they’re more confident doing this at Starbucks than they are with other brands because there is this sense that Starbucks is going to be around forever, it’s not going to collapse.
So, as of 2024, Starbucks had almost US$2billion in unspent funds across those gift and store cards. This functions—because obviously they know, they can study the patterns, they know how much of that… there’s not going to be a bank rush, there’s not going to be a rush on store cards—so this $2billion functions as an interest-free loan, which it then invests and profits from.
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