For about six months now, Starbucks has been testing a system in about a dozen Seattle and Silicon Valley stores that turns the iPhone into a virtual wallet, letting customers pay for lattes and the like with an app that displays a barcode read by a specialized reader at the counter.
But yesterday, Starbucks said the trick will expand to 1,000 Starbucks shops inside Target locations. Which is a little odd, considering Target’s demographic (yes, I’m suggesting a large chuck of Target shoppers may not even know what an iPhone is — despite the fact Target hawks Apple stuff — let alone be aware that, yes, there’s an app for that. In fact, the shift manager at my local Starbucks hadn’t even heard of the program).
Wired’s John C. Abel sounds a bit grumpy about it — and seems to think it’s sort of the app equivalent of a one-hit wonder, as it pays for products from one source. But I’m not so sure we should dismiss this step so quickly. There are technical issues — witness John Cook of Seattle’s TechFlash in this clip messing around with the finicky system, trying to get the reader to read the barcode on his iPhone — but once those get sorted, we could be seeing the beginning of a comprehensive virtual wallet in the U.S. About time, since this sort of thing has been going on elsewhere — like Japan — for years.
Final note: The manager I spoke also said her store was expecting new cash machines within a few weeks; and while the reasons she explained for the new machines were completely unrelated to the iPhone app, is it possible the new reader will also show up? Guess we’ll see.
[via Wired, MobileCrunch]
