Laird feels deprived. Well, maybe that’s not quite true. But the Starbucks rewards program owes him at least seven free drink coupons over the years that he hasn’t received. The horror! The sadness! The caffeine deprivation! He blames the U.S. Postal Service for, perhaps, not forwarding on his coupons. Or for losing them. He wonders, are there any other Starbucks fans out there missing their coupons, too?

I have been wondering this for a long time, and was hoping you could help. I have been a member of Starbucks rewards program for almost 4 years now. As part of this program you used to get 10% off everything, free drink on your birthday, and a few other “perks” (their words not mine). All fine and wonderful. In the last two years or so, they changed the program to reward you with a free drink after 15 purchases and eliminated the 10%. Also fine and dandy. Now I wouldn’t consider myself a Starbucks regular, but I like to go on some Fridays or every once in a while. So within that four year time, I may have received one free drink coupon. These are sent to the rewards member via USPS on a post card. I calculate that at the least I should have received 4 free drinks minimum (4 birthdays). I also estimate that I have purchased somewhere around 50-100 drinks in the 2 year period since they changed to every 16th drink being free. At any rate, it seems that all said and done there should be somewhere around 7-10 free drinks in those last four years. I only remember 1. My suspicion is that USPS workers see these postcards and think how nice it would be to have a free drink.

I would like to clarify that I generally think very low thoughts of the USPS, so maybe I’m just looking for someone to blame. That being said, I am very curious if other people have had issues getting their earned and free b-day drinks like myself. A possible explanation is that USPS doesn’t think these postcards are first class mail, and they don’t forward them in the event of an address change. Who knows. I just thought I would ask.

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