Business
Starbucks coffee shops are a cover for the world’s largest unregulated bank
Published in · 3 min read · Apr 18, 2024
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Starbucks is widely known as an international chain of coffee shops headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It is the world’s largest coffeehouse chain, with 35,711 stores in 80 countries, managed by its 381,000 employees, helping the coffee giant generate $35 billion in revenue.
To the ordinary eye, Starbucks may appear as a normal coffee shop, however, a deeper look into the company’s inner workings reveals that it operates as one of the world’s largest unregulated banks, thanks to its cleverly structured rewards program.
To truly understand how Starbucks operates as a bank, we need to examine how it convinces unsuspecting coffee lovers to make deposits in the first place — the Starbucks Rewards Program.
Introduced in May 2008, the Starbucks Rewards program is a loyalty system that allows customers to deposit money into a Starbucks Rewards account via the Starbucks app. These…
