The App that Ate the Plastic Card

There’s a lot of smart stuff about why the mobile Starbucks phone app caught on and the Mondex digital cash card failed in Dave Birch’s latest at ‘Consult Hyperion’. If you are into e-payments, you should read it, but then if you are into e-payments you’ve probably been reading him for a long time.

All this is partly an excuse to repost this paragraph, that made me laugh:

Incidentally, I got an e-mail from Starbucks telling me that from now on if I use my Starbucks app to buy in-store then the staff can call me by my name. I had to go and log in to my Starbucks account to find out what name I’d used when I set it up. Naturally, I hadn’t used my “real name”, which in this case is pretty handy. When they call out “Latte with extra shot for Dave” there might be many Daves and so confusion, but when they call out “Latte with extra shot for Theogenes de Montford” I’m pretty sure I’ll be the only one up at the counter. But I digress.

I so get that. But somehow I never do it.