“Many in the restaurant and fast food space are looking to cash in on the success Starbucks has seen with its mobile wallet app. Starbucks, as of Q1 2014, has 12 million active users (active = Nirvana in the mobile wallet space) spending $6 million a week on skinny non-fat with an espresso shot lattes (I’m not sure if that is a real selection or not but the data points are impressive). All in all, Starbucks’ app accounts for 15% of Starbucks’ transactions.
Howard Shultz, the dynamic CEO of Starbucks, recently announced the addition of an ‘order/pay-ahead’ feature allowing mobile wallet users to skip the queue. This is an obvious and welcome addition to the app, and one already in play by multiple players in the space including Chipotle, White Castle, and Five Guys.
The perennial king of fast food, McDonalds, is currently facing multiple challenges. Newer competitors such as Chipotle are taking market share, millennials aren’t flocking to buy a Big Mac (research by Technomic found younger millennials in the U.S. traffic to McDonald’s has fallen almost 13% on a monthly basis since 2011), and their longtime rival Burger King is making significant business model changes under CEO Daniel Schwartz (who at 33 years old just happens to be a millennial).’
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