Starbucks won't adopt Square Order when Square Wallet is retired, ending mobile-payments deal
Starbucks To Square: It's Over — You won't be able to pay for that latte with Square. — Starbucks will soon no longer take Square's mobile payments in its stores, unwinding a key aspect …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the beginning of the unwind of one of mobile payments' most-watched partnerships: Square had made Starbucks its marquee retail win, integrating Square Wallet at the register nationwide. With Square retiring Square Wallet and pushing merchants toward its successor product, Starbucks declines to follow, choosing not to adopt Square Order and effectively terminating the deal.
The refusal foreshadows what came next in this arc: Square later disclosed it lost $56M+ on the Starbucks arrangement over three years before the partnership formally wound down in Q3 2016 (a $56M+ three-year loss), and Square Order itself was shut down within months (Square killed Square Order). Meanwhile Starbucks kept investing in its own app, which by 2017 counted more US mobile-payment users than Apple Pay or Google Pay (20.7M US users in 2017).
First-order effects
- Starbucks customers lose the ability to pay with Square's wallet at stores, removing Square's highest-profile retail touchpoint just as Square Wallet is retired.
- Square loses its flagship merchant endorsement and must migrate any remaining Starbucks volume to products Starbucks has explicitly refused to adopt.
Second-order effects
- Starbucks doubles down on its proprietary app as the payments surface, a bet validated when its user base later surpassed Apple Pay's and Google Pay's in the US.
- Square absorbs the financial drag of the subsidized deal — the disclosed multiyear losses — pushing it to rethink how much it pays for brand-name retail distribution.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, large retailers favor first-party wallets over third-party processors, shrinking the addressable footprint for standalone consumer wallets; the same year saw Amazon quietly end its own mobile-wallet beta (Amazon's six-month wallet beta), suggesting thin demand for wallets without an owned retail loop.
The trend: Mobile payments are consolidating around retailer-owned apps rather than third-party wallets, with big merchants treating payments as a loyalty asset instead of outsourcing it.