A café usually earns its money at the register, one order at a time. Starbucks has built a system where a lot of that money arrives before the customer walks in.
Customers can load funds onto a Starbucks Card, and registering it signs them up for Starbucks Rewards automatically. By the end of fiscal 2025, the company’s annual report put its unredeemed stored value card and loyalty program balances at about $1.75 billion. Starbucks describes the card as a tool meant, in part, to bring cardholders into stores more often.
For any business whose customers come back regularly, that points to an opportunity: give customers a good reason to pay for future purchases now, and demand can become easier to count on.
Make Prepaying Simple
The annual report describes the card as a convenient way to pay that also supports gifting. It can be picked up in stores or through the app, and U.S. cards don’t expire. Most cards get used up within a year, according to the annual report.
That likely changes how a balance feels. Once money is on the card, it’s already spoken for, so the next coffee can feel like using what’s there instead of spending something new.
Pair the Balance With Rewards
Rewards is where the incentive comes in. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025, members accounted for 58% of the dollars spent at U.S. company-operated stores, according to the company’s investor dashboard. When Starbucks relaunched the program in March 2026, it added a perk for loading funds: 10 bonus Stars for a digital reload of $30 or more, and 25 for $50 or more.
The bonus arrives when the money goes in, so it rewards the commitment itself and not only the spending that follows. Since a $50 reload earns more Stars than a $30 one, it also seems to nudge people toward putting more on the card at once.
Keep Refreshing the Incentive
Prepaying has a catch, though. Marketing professors John Gourville and Dilip Soman found that when payment comes well before use, the pull of that earlier payment tends to fade over time, which they called “payment depreciation.” A balance that felt like a commitment on the day it was loaded may feel a lot less urgent a few weeks later.
Starbucks revamped its rewards in March 2026, giving people a fresh reason to keep adding to their balance. Its latest dashboard shows the amount loaded onto cards in the U.S. was still higher than a year earlier in the quarter ending in June 2026. That doesn’t show the changes caused the rise, but people were still adding money after the relaunch.
Takeaway
Starbucks makes paying ahead easy, attaches rewards to it, and refreshed those rewards in 2026. The result is a coffee habit turned into money customers have already committed, about $1.75 billion of it in card and loyalty balances at the end of fiscal 2025. For many of them, ordering a coffee now means spending down a balance they already set aside.
Any business with repeat customers can try its own version, whether through prepaid credit, packages, memberships, or bundles. What matters is giving customers something worthwhile for paying early, such as savings, convenience, or perks, and then continuing to give them reasons to use what they’ve bought. Products people already buy often are probably the best fit.
