Starbucks Marketing Gimmick Designed to Raise Awareness of Brand.

This is nothing but a marketing gimmick designed to raise awareness of a brand. While in principal, the prospect of a more alternative and comprehensive method of payment could be interesting, in practice, Starbucks’ system falls short of being anything but a useful tool.  In fact, the larger implication here is that publishers and brands are willing to go to such elaborate lengths to make their products available to the lowest common denominator.

Today, in a consumption-laden populace, who wishes only to be entertained and not educated, capitalist producers and predatory marketers like Starbucks vie with more traditional institutions (in this particular case, credit/debit cards) in order to talk us out of our citizenship, and talk us into believing that all that is demanded from us as citizens can be achieved by us as consumers. The idea of allowing consumers to simply “pay for products by waving their phone near a sensor at the point of purchase,” may sound fun and convenient but it’s really just another ploy to turn citizens into drones of consumers who experience freedom not as a political virtue but as an exercise in the commercial activity of choosing a product. This has been the backbone of capitalist America for the last 30 years. Large companies like Starbucks, Coca Cola, and Microsoft have all helped create a system in which we have convinced citizens to yield their democratic power and their oversight and to treat themselves as private consumers and not as public citizens. In essence, Starbucks’ latest gimmick is a reductive treatment of people and a purposeful and intentional part of a business plan which all these companies (and many others) have been following for decades. The mobile device market is just another billion dollar channel advertisers can use to reach consumers directly and influence their spending.

People forget that we live in a world where information is not just vital to democracy, trade and our living, but is also the basis for the productive economy. That’s why information societies can catch up in a big hurry (as China has done) and modernize themselves very quickly. If anything, the ‘mobile flow of compensation’ here shows us the impact emerging technologies have on an unsuspecting public who are all too eager to compromise the stability of prevailing historical conceptions of interactive life  in favor of subversive influence. The real question then is: Should we allow capitalism to become dependent on unsustainable consumer spending?