I walk into Starbucks this morning and had a profoundly evil thought while trying to shake the cobwebs out of my head.
Many small, independent coffee shops offer something like a frequent drinker card - one free cup of coffee for every 10 cups purchased or somesuch. Starbucks doesn't offer that, probably because there are so damn many stores out there and so many opportunities to abuse the system (that, and they don't need to offer free coffee to attract customers anymore).
So, what if they offered a barcoded plasticized card instead? It would serve two purposes - storing your "regular order" in a corporate database (indexed by barcode), and keeping track of your drinking habits (anonymously, of course). You could even do the one-free-coffee-for-every-hundred-purchased scam, too. For the ultra paranoid, there's nothing stopping anyone from maintaining 3 or 7 "frequent drinker cards", none of which store any personal information other than your "regular order" and an order history. It would certainly speed up ordering and checkout (at the cost of removing yet another human element from the equation - the barista who knows her regular customers and their regular orders).
