Starbucks Shrinks Redemption Time For Birthday Reward To 4 Days

It’s lots of fun to spend your birthday scooping up your favorite rewards from restaurants and stores, and some are even kind enough to give you a longer deadline to redeem them. Watch out, though: as of the end of September, Starbucks shrank the redemption window from one week around your birthday to just four days.

This information comes from the fab and very specialized blog Starbucks Melody, which reports that Starbucks has narrowed the birthday reward redemption window to two days before your birthday, the day itself, and the day after.

If you’ve been waiting around for the old-school postcards to arrive in your mailbox, remember that all of Starbucks’ rewards are now digital, and have to be connected to either a smartphone app or a registered Starbucks gift card. To get the reward, you have to register an account before your birthday comes.

Why did Starbucks make the change? They say that they wanted to make the reward more about customers’ actual birthdays, and not in their birth week. (Giving customers less time to redeem the rewards means that fewer rewards will probably be redeemed, which is also a good reason to shrink the window.)

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist