Death of the Punchcard

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Thanks to all the coffee criminals in Los Angeles County, the Coffee Bean punch card is dead.

We must salute a bunch of really ingenious individuals who had recently started the trend of selling actual Coffee Bean metallic punchers over the Internet, causing the coffee maven to notify their customers that starting October 15th, their punch cards will be nothing more than a holy piece of pink.

That's right -- if you have ten, eleven or even twelve punches on your card and you've been dreaming of getting that free thirteenth drink and it's after October 15th, you might as well use it as a bookmark because it's worth less than the paper it was printed on.

Instead, the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf will be migrating to a much more secure technology which will involve lasers, a gun that uses lasers of some kind and a plastic card that allows guns containing lasers to scan said card and confirm that indeed you have twelve and not two "scans." It will be, apparently, much harder to reprogram your own laser gun with the correct frequency and code than stealing punch card devices -- which, once again, confirms that Coffee Bean has acted first and thought about the decision later (case in point: the banana/caramel and pomegranite blendeds).

Here at LAist, our only advice is this: drink drink drink drink as fast as you can, and get all your punch cards prepared for P5K -- because punchcard death 2005 is pretty much, almost already here.