Instead Of Buying Coffee Before Work Everyday, One Person Found A Way To Get Free Cups Of Coffee For Months

Jayne Elliott

6 months ago

Shutterstock/Reddit

Starbucks is expensive.

While many people are willing to splurge for their coffee, if you compare how much it costs to make coffee at home versus buying it at Starbucks, you’d probably be tempted to stop buying it.

What if there were a way to get free coffee at Starbucks?

That may sound too good to be true, but for the clever person in this story, it was reality for several months.

Let’s see how they got free coffee.

I got free coffee from Starbucks for about 6 months

About 15 years ago I was working in NYC and I would take advantage of the free refills that Starbucks had for drip coffee.

The offer was really meant for people sitting in the store but I would buy coffee in the morning and then bring my cup back around 1 or 2p for another cup.

Apparently in NYC, they weren’t allowed to actually refill the cup for health code reasons or something.

So they’d throw out the cup and give you a new one.

That’s when I realized there was a loophole here.

This is somewhat genius.

I kept five cups and brought them home.

Then I started bringing one in the morning to Starbucks and I’d get a free “refill”.

I’d do this every day and I’d end up with 5 gross paper Starbucks cups at work and then I’d bring them home on Friday and repeat the next week.

One day, this loophole didn’t work.

I did this for months, not paying for coffee at all, until one day I brought in my cup and handed it to the barista for a refill only to realize that all of the cups behind the counter were different.

It was getting close to the holidays and they’d switched to their holiday logo cups.

Well, color me embarrassed.

I started paying for coffee again after that. It was a good run though.

Oh, she could’ve kept it going. Wait a week and bring in the new cups.

What does Reddit think of cheating the system at Starbucks?

The Starbucks employees knew.