Starbucks, Living Social Join Up for Gift Card Offer (SBUX, GRPN, GOOG)

Retail

Published: September 4, 2012 4:18 pm

Last Updated: September 5, 2012 5:02 am

The world’s largest coffee store chain, Starbucks Inc. (NASDAQ: SBUX) will offer customers a $10 store gift card for $5 through daily-deal company Living Social, a competitor to Groupon Inc. (NASDAQ: GRPN). Starbucks made a similar offer to customers through Google Inc.’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) Google Offers earlier this year.

One of the knocks on Groupon both before and after its IPO was that there was a low barrier to entry for competing daily-deal offers. Groupon’s stock posted a new 52-week low today of $4.00 before gaining some of it back.

Starbucks’ chief digital officer had this to say about the deal with Living Social:

It’s an evolving space. The type of deal, the type of merchant and the implementation of offers are going to be different from circumstance to circumstance.

Starbucks and Living Social expect to sell 1 million of the half-price gift cards.

Starbucks shares are up 0.2% in after-hours trading today, at $48.62 after closing the regular session down 0.2%. The stock’s 52-week range is $35.12 to $62.00.

Paul Ausick

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