Fine print on Starbucks Wi-Fi: buy something every 30 days

A reader of my story this week on how indie cafés feel about Starbucks' plan to offer two hours of free Wi-Fi access a day had a clever idea.

"Instead of buying a [Starbucks] card," wrote SQLGuru at Slashdot, "find someone who is done with their card (esp. if it has just a few cents on it) and get free wi-fi without paying anything......maybe start an after-market market for Starbucks cards."

SQLGuru - you are either a Real Man of Genius, or a cash-starved student.

I decided to check with Starbucks to see if it had anticipated this stratagem, as well as several others I thought of.

Turns out, it had.

This is what I knew already: to get two hours of free Wi-Fi a day at Starbucks, users must have an AT&T Wi-Fi account. This requires a 16-digit code from a Starbucks Card, a magnetic striped card that can be bought or reloaded for as little as $5 at any of Starbucks' 7,000 locations (bought online, the minimum value is $15).

I found out that a Card remains valid even if there are only pennies or even zero value left on it. And unlike many store gift cards, a Starbucks Card never expires, according to a spokeswoman.

Also, there's no difference between Starbucks Cards purchased individually or those bought by a corporation in bulk to reward employees.

So what are the catches? The first one - and this wasn't mentioned in the press release - is that the Starbucks Card must be "active." In other words, it must have been used in some fashion in the last 30 days.

Well, the only way you can use a Starbucks Card is to either add money to it or buy something with it.

In theory, you could keep adding $5 to your card once a month and never buy a thing using the Card (and sell it off on Craigslist for full price later). Or you could buy something with your Starbucks Card one month and load it with the minimum $5 the next month to limit actual purchases to once every two months.

Either way is pretty complicated and not worth the trouble to most people. So, you'll probably be buying something at Starbucks at least once every 30 days to maintain your Wi-Fi (though Starbucks hopes it'll be much more).

That begs the question: what are the cheapest items on the Starbucks' menu? The smallest cup of plain coffee is about $1.50, though the company is also testing $1 cups of coffee in Seattle as a possible way of better competing with McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts.

Even cheaper than the $1.50 coffee are the new donuts from Seattle's Top Pot Doughnuts, which are being rolled out nationally and start as low as $1.25 (and are in my opinion, crazy delicious).

Another catch is that your free AT&T Wi-Fi account only grants you one Wi-Fi session of up to two consecutive hours a day. As soon as you log-off, you're done at Starbucks for the day. That's true no matter how much time you have left, whether you're trying to log-in again at the same Starbucks store or a different one, or how many active Starbucks Cards you have attached to that account.

You could try to open multiple AT&T Wi-Fi accounts, each using a different Starbucks Card code, the same way people have multiple e-mail accounts. But AT&T has anticipated that, too. According to the spokeswoman, the AT&T server will be able to prevent the same computer from logging in under multiple accounts. She didn't know the specifics, but I am guessing AT&T will check your laptop's MAC address, which is the unique number linked to your wireless card or chip.

Of course, there are always workarounds...hackers can "spoof" their MAC address, while the strong can lug multiple computers with them. That's less arduous today, now that there are 2-lb., $400 mini-notebooks such as the Asus eee and Everex CloudBook.

Still, Wi-Fi at Starbucks is undoubtedly much cheaper than it was before, if it wasn't free. And it may serve CEO Howard Schultz's plan of bringing in more visitors. Will you be one of them?