Hacker News Reader

I wonder if Jonathan is around and is able to look up the transaction history on the starbucks website, and if that shows any information on where the money is spent/moved?

Jonathan here:

The transaction info available on the Starbucks site and mobile app is pretty limited, but I can see that the transactions are listed as "In Store Purchase". For example:

http://cl.ly/3H1j3g443X0y0O3j2M2L

Unfortunately, there is no info about which stores the purchases were made in, and the history only goes back about 20 transactions. It does look like some people are making large purchases, which is jerky, but not totally unexpected.

Thanks, j

Thanks for your reply. I noticed an autoreload button in the screenshot and an idea I had is maybe it is possible to utilise 2 cards and reload one with the other when the balance goes below a certain amount? This would stop a person taking a large amount in a single transaction.

Something does sound fishy. I wonder why someone would ruin the fun for everyone involved.

$100 spent on coffee for the homeless maybe? Just to take an optimistic view on the data.

You could be right, since something similar did take place as can be confirmed in one of the posts below (a large purchase for the homeless). But certainly we can agree that $15, $30, and $100 being drained in minutes to the exact penny must be cause for concern.

Edit: draining to $0.00 is OK, as jonathan explains below.

Jonathan here:

Draining the card to the penny is not weird. If there is $10 on the card and your purchase is $11.50, $10 will be removed from the card and you have to pay the remaining $1.50 some other way.

Expected behavior :) j

There is at least two cases that this doesnt explain.

http://twitter.com/#!/jonathanscard/status/10034195955777536...

http://twitter.com/#!/jonathanscard/status/10035604975584460...

edit: now at least 5, see above

Jonathan here:

I see what you're saying, and of course it is possible that some jerk is buying gift cards with the card.

That said, it's worth pointing out that the tweet stream is not real time and it doesn't have every transaction. The card balance is scraped from the sbux site every minute and posted to Twitter if it has changed since the last tweet. When there are multiple transactions in the same minute, the changes get aggregated. This can result in some strange looking numbers.

What I think we're learning here is that if someone wants to reload the card, lots of little transactions over time is better than one big one. Or, perhaps the balance should not be tweeted.

Thoughts? j

I vote that you encourage people to make lots of little transactions over time versus just getting rid of the balance.

The balance is really neat to see and it keeps people engaged and thinking about this project, even if they're not actively partaking (like myself, at the moment).

The smaller installments of cash also help others realize that it's okay to submit small amounts and increase the likelihood that more than just one person with a large purchase will benefit.

Can you put spending limits on a card? Or disable it entirely?

What I'm wondering is if you can have a deposit-only card, which transfers funds to the live card to keep it topped up at $10. Downside is some people have to wait an extra minute or two for free coffee; upside is someone trying to clean out the account has to spread it over a bunch of transactions, which even if it doesn't stop everyone probably raises the barrier to entry.

A PayPal account could also work for this.

Then you could broadcast a rough total balance, and just have a binary indicator for when the live card gets topped up.

Thanks for your feedback! Your suggestion is a good one and something that I've been considering. It is possible to reload one sbux card from another, so I was thinking about using one for deposit only and dribbling the balance into the purchase card at $20 per hour or similar. I think there's something about this that would ruin the excitement so I'm working on different approach at the moment. Not sure where it'll end up.

Yeah, I was thinking about that too. One thought I had (which others have suggested) is to encourage people to donate in small amounts— rather than drop $25 on the card if you're feeling generous, you should drop $5 on it each morning for a week.

But since that's kind of a hassle, then you'd whip up a quick app that lets people easily amortize a larger contribution over a series of coffee-scale contributions. Connect that to their twitter account, and you can credit each individual coffee donation to an individual and report them individually.

It's effectively the same as having a larger account balance, but since you're not holding the money it feels more engaging and social for folks.

The thing that scares me about this idea is the effect it would have on the donor if they didn't see their donation reflected immediately in the feed. Not only is it less exciting, but it potentially opens up questions about where the money is in the meantime.

I will strenuously avoid this turning into anything resembling a bank - it needs to be more like a "take a penny, leave a penny" tray sitting on a Starbucks counter. If someone want to be a jerk and empty the tray into his pocket, so be it. They're just a jerk who I'm sure will get what they deserve in life.

Fingers crossed, j

Mine too!

If you go with the deposit only card option, you could adjust your feed to display the aggregate of the two cards; but you're effectively capping an individual transaction to $20. The donor therefore sees their changes reflected in real time, but any cheats are limited (hopefully a cashier would get suspicious / frustrated if someone tried to work around the $20 limit by going multiple times in succession).

Perhaps use your API to determine when the card is less than $20 and add money to it then (rather than hourly rate), that way these big purchases can't be made?

How about someone buying a coffeemaker (they sell those) and telling the clerk "I've got $100 on the card and I'll pay the rest in cash"?

Jonathan here:

The beauty of this is that one person can't ruin the fun for everyone involved. Call me a hopeless romantic, but I think people who don't get the concept are in the minority. Their behavior will be overrun 100x by people who do get the concept.

We'll see what happens soon enough... j

Reply on news.ycombinator.com