Mon, 01/27/2014 – 09:45 by Last week Starbucks
announced its quarterly earnings. Most interesting to us about the announcement and related conference call was the company’s discussion of mobile and specifically mobile payments.
CEO Howard Schultz said on the
earnings call that, “together mobile and Starbucks card payments represent over 30% of total U.S. payment.” He added that roughly 10 million customers are using the company’s in-app payments capability. Schultz also reported that nearly “5 million mobile transactions [are] taking place in our stores each week.”
There are several things interesting about this. First the volume and scale are considerable. These are Starbuck’s best customers generally speaking — Schultz said that 50%+ of the mobile payments customers are “gold status” members — but the convenience of mobile payments is also helping reinforce their loyalty to the chain.
Unlike “horiztonal” mobile wallets (e.g., ISIS, Google Wallet) this is the kind of scenario driving mobile payments in the market today: a very specific use case with clear benefits to consumers. On the strength of these data and general recognition of the opportunity we’ll see more and more QSR and similarly situated restaurant chains adopt an app-based mobile payments model this year.
