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Well, that's hyperbolic (and shares something with journalism that reports things in useless but colorful units like "massive as a dozen bull elephants"), but i

Well, that's hyperbolic (and shares something with journalism that reports things in useless but colorful units like "massive as a dozen bull elephants"), but if we sidestep the question of how Starbucks compares to small banks, it does seem pretty impressive that they're holding $2B USD worth of stored value cardholders' money? NYT reports 25% of US consumers use BNPL to buy groceries[1] which seems worrying. 1: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/02/business/buy-now-pay-later-groceries.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/02/business/buy-now-pay-late...

grues-dinner 1y ago
> Well, that's hyperbolic It's also a bit misleading because if you included every company that holds onto pre-paid customer money as the denominator, Starbucks may be be way lower down. My energy company at some point managed to get four-figures of my money in their bank account as "credit" before I could get it back. Games companies where you buy "tokens" for in game use also must be sitting on huge reserves. And any business that sells you "packages" up front, from hairdressers to IVF (probably individually quite small, though). In China, almost every restaurant and shop has a membership program where you get discounts for topping up certain amounts. When you have 500 in the account and your meal is 145.63, there's often a small interest-free loan to the business sitting there.