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Starbucks Bucks– a travel card?

Funny blog entry on Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, a Canadian economics blog about using your Starbucks bucks (Sbucks) card to get rid of your spare change at airports.  You know the drill you are traveling to country XYZ and you have a couple of Euro or pound coins in your pocket, and the notional value of coins in Europe can be rather high. 

I’ve always dismissed Sbucks as a promotional gimmick, but it turns out that your Sbucks are good all over the world; Starbucks takes care of calculating the exchange rate.  So if you are at Heathrow airport with a few pound coins and a few bills you can load-up your Sbucks card to use back home.  Brilliant!

I guess I will start drinking Starbucks coffee – maybe McDonald will eventually have the same idea?  Interestingly, the use of Sbucks increases the money supply (I don’t know maybe we should call it M9).  It reminds me of a story: many years ago a colleague tried to pay a Bangkok stripper with Canadian Tire dollars – didn’t work! So maybe Canadian Tire and Starbucks dollars not really part of the money supply.…

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