Starbucks Pulls Plug on Jonathan's Card
Communal Starbucks Card Deactivated After Man Transfers Funds to Feed Starving Children
Starbucks Coffee Company has pulled the plug on a "pay-it-forward" social experiment following allegations of fraud and threats of legal action.
Starbucks recently made the decision to abruptly shut down the communal Jonathan's Card, after reports that the funds were not being used just for coffee.
App developer and author, Jonathan Stark, came up with the month-old social experiment inviting everyone to purchase coffee drinks by swiping the barcode copied from his Starbucks card mobile phone image. Anonymous donors could add to the balance by reloading it online.
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Stark launched Jonathan's Card on July 14 as a social adaptation of the "take a penny, leave a penny" concept.
Within weeks, hundreds of charitable strangers willing to give others a free cup of coffee added more than $10,000 to the account.
What went wrong?
The project started out as a simple act of kindness. Stark used the social media experiment to test the market by using digital currency via mobile phones.
However, The Christian Post was notified a few days ago that digital ventures at Starbucks deactivated the popular card.
Reports started coming in verifying that a blogger compromised the experiment by claiming online that he had developed a script that would alert them to when Jonathan's card reached a certain balance. They would then transfer donated money onto their own Starbuck's card.
The blogger, now identified as computer programmer Sam Odin, started pulling funds, $625 to be exact, from the card.
Odin, bored with idea of “yuppies buying yuppies coffees,” decided to “mix things up a bit." He created a code where he transferred the donated money off of Jonathan’s Card and onto his own Starbucks gift card, according to his blog post entitled, “How to use Jonathan’s card to buy yourself an iPad.”
To his credit, Odin announced online he wasn't going to buy himself an iPad. He said he only planned to sell the card on eBay and donate the proceeds to Save The Children. Odin said he hoped to see if people would bid up the price of the card to face value or exceed it on eBay.
After news of Odin's exploit reached the web, he offered to return the money if Stark considered it theft.
“It’s not about the $625, it’s about the social and moral concepts involved," Odin wrote in his blog.
“Assuming the card sells for face value, I’ll have fed 20 children for a month.”
The Save the Children organization did not respond to The Christian Post despite repeated attempts to contact the group for a comment about the scam.
Adam Brotman, vice president of digital ventures at Starbucks Coffee Company, reportedly called Stark himself on Friday to advise him his experiment was over.
Brotman reportedly liked Stark's original plan, but in the end decided it had to be cancelled because sharing gift cards is against the terms of service at Starbucks.
He was formerly the senior vice president at Corbis, a Bill Gates-owned digital image licensing company where he was responsible for several divisions of the company, including web strategy and design, marketing, pricing, and web analytics. So an idea like Starks' seemed appealing at first.
It is interesting to note that Stark was presumably the first person to figure out that he could use an image to bypass Starbucks' one-phone-at a-time rule.
"I'm sad about it, first and foremost, because we were legitimately cheering on this experiment," Brotman told reporters in a statement.
What is the public response?
Meanwhile on eBay, the Starbucks card received 34 bids to purchase the $500 Starbucks gift card. Due to the card limit at the company, Odin could only sell one $500 gift card, while the other $125 would be sold after the first auction came to a close.
Bidder a***3, the highest bidder, offered $760.00 for the $500 card. The Starbucks card, however, was removed Tuesday afternoon on eBay, most likely due to all of the controversy.
Though a few people had actually made a bid, hundreds of others began publicizing their anger over the misappropriation of funds, blasting their comments on the Facebook page dedicated to Jonathan’s card.
Odin went so far as to post a comment on the page saying “Hi, I’m Sam Odin, a yuppie that’s caused a bit of brouhaha. I did so by diverting money from their coffee fund to feed children in need. While I haven’t been able to read or reply to all of the feedback coming in, if you respond to this post I promise I’ll read it.”
One commenter named Scott Golz responded, “Although I can see your good intention, this was in fact, a coffee fund... I think your approach was way off base, as you can see, most people feel that way. You stole someone’s good intention, twisted it and morphed it into something that you wanted. If you wanted to feed the children, great! Come up with a different project. I think Jonathan just wanted people to enjoy a good cup of coffee and give people a chance to pay it forward.”
Another commenter, Pattie Lee shared, “In a court of law you would be found guilty of theft. Your intentions do not matter. Fact is fact, you took money that did not belong to you. It was not yours.”
Responding to all of the “threats against [his] personal safety,” Odin created a Q&A page on his blog answering some common misconceptions people had from his experiment.
He did say that he was "not a modern-day Robin Hood." Odin firmly writes that he does not believe he was stealing anything.
“My brother was donating $625 as I was taking it out," Odin posted.
"Therefore our net impact of the card was $0. Use of the card itself also had a very broad mandate and anyone in the community could use this card, not just one set of people. No specific withdrawal limits were set, though clearly one was implied.”
Stark wrote an open letter in response to Odin.
“My impression is not the one that matters," Stark said in the letter.
"The impressions that matter are those of the people who have been touched by and participated in Jonathan’s Card. If you’d like to speak to them, you can do so on their Facebook page.”
And to that, hundreds of people had something to say, as showcased by the number of posts and comments currently on the Facebook page dedicated to Jonathan's Card - including Odin.
“Am I alone in thinking that helping a stranger find their next caffeine fix is not what we should be worried about in today’s world?" Odin responded.
Acknowledging the feedback, he publicly apologized to anyone who was hurt, angry, or frustrated with the role he played. He thought because Jonathan’s Card was an experiment, “finding interesting new uses for the card [was] fair-game,” which he found was apparently not the case.
“Had I known so many were invested in this, I would have certainly done things differently. I do feel genuinely bad for any distress that I’ve caused,” he added.
As for the next move for Stark - he posted his intentions on his website recently.
“The time has come for this wonderful experiment to make a transformation. We believe this is the start to a bigger more glowing picture.”
Encouraging everyone to “keeping paying it forward,” the mobile app creator said, “In the last 5 days or so, we’ve received hundreds of stories of people doing small things to brighten a stranger’s day: Paying for the next car at the drive through...Charging up a phone card and sharing it with strangers at the airport. The list goes on, and on, and on...”
Spurring on other projects, Jonathan’s Card sparked a slew of random acts of kindness across the country. Other communal Starbucks cards were started as well, without all of the controversy.
Although Jonathan’s Card came to an abrupt end, the effects of his social experiment appear to be ongoing.
“So tonight we lose our barcode,” Stark concluded. “But of course, we never needed it in the first place.”
The@jonathanscard Twitter account, which was previously updating followers with the card's balance, observed its end with this final tweet: "The next chapter begins jonathanstark.com/card."
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