Starbucks is an ever popular topic for bargain hunters, even if the recession has hurt the green giant’s popularity. Here are all of the Starbucks discounts and coupons I know about.
- Register your Starbucks gift card online and you can get up to 2 hours of free WiFi every day at their coffeeshops, plus refills and other perks.
- If you are a big fan, consider buying a $25 Gold Card that gets you perks like 10% off most items. A certain Bargain Hunter says “you need to spend $250 a year at Starbucks, which is $4.80 a week” to get your money back.
- Befriend a barista and ask them if any specials are coming up. Never hurts to be friendly!
- Select chains sell $1 cups of instant coffee.
- Starbucks recently introduced a few $4 breakfasts that include a drink.
- Many Costco‘s sell 5 $20 Starbucks gift cards for $80, a 25% discount.
- A few times I have gotten a “free upgrade” to a decaf Americano when ordering decaf in the afternoon, when many shops stop brewing decaf. Being a caffeine lightweight has benefits!
- Many Web sites sell gift cards at a discount, including ABCGiftCards.com (10% off), GiftCardsAgain.com (10% off), or GiftCards4Less.com (auction site).
- Sign up for Starbucks email list, which occasionally includes notices about drink giveaways, free shipping codes, and other perks.
What Starbucks deals am I missing?
Thanks, Jonathan!
April 29th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
I’m fairly certain that the $2 drink deal ended in 2008.
April 29th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
I’m double checking right now…
April 29th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
The last time I was at Sbux, I wanted to get a refill of drip coffee.
I thought it would be free (and I think it was supposed to be due to my using a SBux card to purchase it), but I ended up getting charged 50 cents.
That’s not bad (I’ll have to check into whether it was supposed to be free). It’s something I think they do often because there are more than a couple local homeless guys who are in there all the time and who keep their cups (smart!).
While a free refill is good, a 50-cent refill is OK by me.
April 29th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
I was right:
From here: https://www.starbucks.com/cardrewards/default.asp
Use your REGISTERED SBux card to purchase the coffee, then present that same card with the cup and you are supposed to get a free refill.
The kicker, if there is on, is that you need to register your SBux card at Starbucks.com.
I’ve already done that because that’s how you get the free 2-hours/day Wi-Fi: you have to register your SBux card, have made a purchase with it during the past month and then you have to open a wi-fi account with AT&T. It’s a lot of hoops to jump through (and I ended up hooking a second SBux card up to my account because the first one ran out and I had a lot of credit on the second one, so it was better to add the card rather than add money to the first one), but free Wi-Fi and free refills is worth it.
Coffee Bean has free wi-fi, no purchase necessary. On a “normal” computer it works great. Unfortunately two of my PCs are not normal and refuse to run the Coffee Bean Wi-Fi. I haven’t yet figured out why, and with a little work I could probably fix the bug … but those same two PCs have no trouble with Sbux wi-fi … so that predisposes me to Sbux and not Coffee Bean for my free-wi-fi use.
April 29th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
$100 of cards for $80 should be 20% off and not 25%….but still good deal!
April 29th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Most Costcos were forced to stop selling the Starbucks gift cards in late December 2008, too much demand & it was pulled by Starbucks.
April 29th, 2009 at 8:48 pm
I Tried http://www.abcgiftcards.com in the past and got the cards in 3 days.
April 30th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Bummer. I thought a few of them still sold the cards. Hopefully they will return for the holidays.