Caffee Pagato: A Coffee Pay-It-Forward Experiment

I recently discovered Jonathan’s Card – a pay it forward type experiment where the Starbucks App featuring Jonathan’s gift card is being made available to the public.

All you have to do is save the picture to your smart phone and take it in to any Starbucks (apparently it works in the United States but not some other countries) and have the saved picture’s bar code scanned to pay for your drink.

This may seem like a new and unique idea to pass on a cup of coffee to strangers. However, unknowingly, the concept is based on an old Italian customer referred to as caffee pagato which translates to “Coffee Paid”.

The catch the experiment is to see how many people will use the card and how many people will reload the card. Adding more cash to the card (paying it forward) is as easy as going online and clicking “reload this card”. On his site, Jonathan says that “If you’re feeling generous, you can also add money to [the] Starbucks card by doing this and enjoy some serious good karma.”

You can read all the details on Jonathan’s site or keep track of the balance and activities on Twitter @jonathanscard.

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Update: Since the writing and publishing of this post, Jonathan’s Card has been deactivated and shut down. You can still visit his website to read the statement or follow him on Twitter.