I set up my Starbucks card to automatically reload every time my balance went below $10. Great, except now my grandson somehow has it on his phone too so I keep paying for his coffee. How can I turn off auto-reload before he bankrupts me??
Some technological issues aren’t actually about technology at all, but about social dynamics and familial relations. This is a case in point: the problem here is that you don’t seem to want to tell your grandson to delete the darn card and stop mooching off your Starbucks account. I’d suggest that’s the best option and it’s a good teaching moment for him too: just because you have something doesn’t mean you have permission to use it.
Still, if you’d rather not do that, what you could do is get a new Starbucks card and switch the auto-reload to that, leaving the old one to wither and die on the vine as he ekes every last penny out of it. It won’t automatically tell him that there’s a new card available, but I suppose he could stumble upon it. Perhaps you just need a completely new Starbucks account with a new email, new password, and card?
Or, heck, you can just turn off auto-reload and give it a few weeks. Once the card starts to fail and isn’t magically reloaded, he’ll give up and possibly even switch to his own card or delete the Starbucks app entirely! Let’s have a look at how to disable auto-reload, and you can report back how it all worked out!
Log in to the Starbucks Card area on the Starbucks site (go to their home page and click on “Card” along the top).
You’ll see something like what I have:
Notice that it gives details on the auto-reload setting (auto-reload $50 when it goes below $15) and below that is a link “Edit Auto-Reload“. You can also proceed by clicking on the “Reload Card” option on the left menu:
Of course you could report the card stolen, but we don’t want to get your grandson in trouble, just have him stop using your card, right? Right? 🙂
Once you click on “Edit Auto-Reload” you’ll see this:
Your address probably won’t be blurred out, but it’s going to look basically like this. Still no way to cancel, but if you click on the link “edit auto-reload settings” on the left, the next screen lets you tweak the settings:
More importantly, at the bottom of the screen, it has the option “suspend or cancel auto-reload“. Click on that!
I would suggest that you just outright cancel auto-reload: If you suspend it the app shows when the suspension ends, which would defeat the purpose of your card “drying up”. Click on the radio button adjacent to “Cancel auto-reload on this card” and click Confirm.
Done. Now let’s see what happens!