I tossed a Starbucks card last year, that my brother gave me. I wouldn't drink that monkey p!ss even if given to me.
As an afterthought, I shoulda at least gone through the drive-through a couple of times, and poured the crap out on the driveway as soon as they handed it to me.
Poor attitude for a fine product and a successful business. Are you sure you aren't a latent liberal?
I found a couple of starbucks cards in the junk drawer that were 3-4 years old. I looked them up on the Internet, and they are still valid. Maybe I will use them to buy some muffins for my coworkers.
If you really wanted to stick it to Starbucks, you should have just sold the gift card on eBay and used the funds for something else...like a visit to the Heart Attack Grill in Phoenix, Arizona. You get my point, hopefully.
By throwing the card away, or by buying their coffee and pouring it out on the sidewalk, they get the money that ought to be yours. That gift card has cash value!
Gift cards can be donated to service personel if you do not want it. Just give it to the cashier and tell them you want to donate it to a service person. They will get it to them.
I told my wife this Christmas: no gift cards. Give cash
I hate starbucks coffee but love the gift cards - if they are given to me. They have other stuff there. And you can always take it back for a refund and get the cash.
There were a couple of anti-Starbucks snobs I used to work with that would always give me the gift cards that they had received (lots of people and companies in the Seattle area tend to pass them out fairly frequently). I'd use them for emergency sandwiches for quick lunches and some hard items. It worked out to a few hundred dollars worth of stuff over time. It's just a "living off the fat of the land" sort of thing.