Starbucks is releasing an offer for a limited time that provides, in effect, a 20% bonus to your coffee budget: Purchase $25 in Starbucks gift cards and get one free $5 eGift card. This offer is available on Monday only. The promotion is limited to the first 400,000 redemptions and one bonus per person, making this easily one of the most straightforward holiday wins for loyal customers and last-minute gifters alike.
How the Starbucks Gift Card Promotion Works
The mechanics are refreshingly straightforward. Buy any $25 Starbucks gift card or five $5 gift cards in a single transaction and receive an additional $5 eGift with no extra charge. The bonus is digital, so you can apply it to your Starbucks app in mere moments or gift it to someone else within seconds.
There’s no promo code to follow or complicated tiers to work through. Just remember the main guardrails: The offer is good only while supplies last; one bonus card per customer; and once the 400,000 cards are gone, so is the deal. Other Starbucks promotions like it have historically sold out fast.
Why This Starbucks Gift Card Deal Is Best This Week
A $5 premium on a $25 purchase is clean, upfront value added — no purchasing-point mathematics necessary. As a point of reference, Starbucks doesn’t often offer discounts on individual menu items; it gets people in the door by incentivizing loyalty with Stars and tailored app offers. So a straight cash-value bump is something worth noting, especially around the time of year people are doing coffee runs and other treat-yourself transactions.
Gift cards are still the most requested holiday present in the U.S., according to the National Retail Federation, with digital cards stealing a lead in 2016 (not surprisingly given they’re often last-minute afterthoughts). Industry analysts have put Americans’ annual spending on gift cards in the hundreds of billions, and consumer finance researchers like Bankrate have found that Americans leave billions of dollars worth of gift card value unused every year. Allowing the addition of Starbucks cards directly into the app minimizes that waste, by letting users keep track of their balances and tap them to pay.
There’s a behavior side, too: Starbucks has tens of millions of active loyalty members in the U.S., and gift-card reloads are a proven onramp into the Rewards ecosystem.
When people pay with a registered Starbucks Card in the app, they earn Stars on food and beverage purchases — a virtuous cycle the company touts in investor communications.
Smart Ways to Use the Starbucks $25 Gift Card Offer
Transform your purchase into five stocking stuffers by buying five $5 cards with your $25 and then keeping the bonus $5 eGift for yourself. Or, you can load the $25 to your Starbucks app and save the $5 bonus for an occasional rainy-day treat. Either way, it’s a way to stretch out everyday spend without changing your approach.
For Rewards members: Add the card(s) and bonus eGift to your online account from 12/21–12/27, then pay using the app (or registered Card) in appropriately marked transactions. One other thing to note: purchasing the gift card doesn’t earn you Stars; rather, you accumulate Stars when redeeming it on eligible transactions. And you can maximize value by redeeming during Double Star Days or with targeted in-app offers.
The $5 may not, in fact, be quite enough to order a full handcrafted drink in every market (and that’s especially true in New York), but it would certainly cover much of the cost for a latte as well as some of the cost for a holiday bakery item or breakfast sandwich. On, say, a $6 to $7 order, that free $5 knocks your out-of-pocket down to 2 or so bucks pre-tax.
Fine Print and Eligibility Details You Should Know
- Only one free $5 eGift per person.
- Bonus offer is available for new customers only and is subject to a bonus cap of 400,000 redemptions.
- Qualifying purchase equals $25 in Starbucks gift cards, which you can get by purchasing either one $25 gift card or five separate $5 value cards in the same transaction.
- Free $5 comes in the form of an eGift card. Starbucks Card Terms and Conditions apply; usual exclusions include buying gift cards with gift cards or to pay certain fees.
Bottom Line: Act Fast to Secure the Starbucks Bonus
This one’s an easy, high-value deal: Spend $25, get $30 worth in Starbucks value — and then roll the bonus into your everyday routine. Given there’s a hard cap on redemptions and that eGifts are one-per-person, best to lock it in now rather than sit on your hands and see the last of those free $5 rides get snapped up.
