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Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Fledgling Starbucks Junkie or How I Converted my Mom to Starbucks

For those of you who aren't on my Twitter feed, you probably haven't heard my express my love for coffee. It is one of my favorite things on the planet and I drink lots of it in various forms. However, you would think I would be more of a Starbucks's junkie than I actually am. I've only been on Starbucks Rewards program for about a year. Before that, it was just get it wherever. I lived close to the Sentient Bean, a Savannah institution, and the nearest SB was up about 15 blocks. Not exactly conducive to my being in there every day. However, suffice to say, that changed and now I'm in Starbucks every other day or so and I make copious use of the Rewards program. I'll talk about my feelings for the various changes they made in another post. This is about my fledgling Starbucks' junkie mother whom I have slowly but surely dragged over to the dark side.

My mom is not as much of a coffee drinker as I am. I can have it and still head to bed less than an hour later. She, unfortunately, is much for sensitive to caffeine and thus cannot have regular coffee after about 2 in the afternoon if she would like to go to bed at 10. Thus, I never really thought I would be able to get her to darken the doors of a Starbucks as she works full time as a teacher and thus doesn't usually have time in the morning to be bothered. Far too busy getting the little kiddos into their appropriate places. Fortunately, I've been able to do things like bring her Starbucks on the weekend to get her more in tune with it.

For her birthday in April, I brought her a Starbucks gift card because she had been more and more interested in having coffee (and other things but I focus on the coffree). All things considered, she at first was just going to use the gift card and be rid of it much like every other gift card she is given. However, I had recently discussed with her that we were getting enough coffee that we would probably qualify for a reward if we used the rewards program. Thus began the discussion of whether or not we really got enough use of it to make it worth it. In the end, she got the app on her phone and even managed to know where the gift card was in order to connect the two. This past Sunday we were in a local Kroger which sported a Starbucks counter and she said, 'Why don't we get coffee? I have my gift card set up.' I was surprised and pleased. Surprised because my mother is not the queen of technological advancement without some kind of assistance and pleased because that meant I would get a cup of coffee without having to pay for it. (It's the little joys in life.) We did our grocery shopping and on the way out of the store, we stopped by the counter and I had to show her how to actually use the app. Her phone is a Droid, mine is an Iphone, so there was a momentary confusion there of learning the app on a new platform, but it went over well. She paid for our coffee and off we went.

So she has gone from a casual user to a member of the rewards program, I think I can officially say my mother is a fledgling Starbucks junkie. Now if I could just see about buying the coffee for the brewer here at the house. :)

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