Why McDonald’s, Dunkin’, Starbucks, and other chains keep making their rewards programs worse—and getting away with it

Aaron Braun had decided to play the long game with his Dunkin’ Rewards points. For five years, his employer, an IT company that kept him on the road, covered his coffee and breakfast via a company card linked to his Dunkin’ account, so he never bothered to redeem his points. In the Dunkin’ app, every purchase inches a progress bar further to the right, unlocking the first reward at 150 points, then topping out at 900. “My bar has been full forever,” Braun jokes. Last year, he was staring at a stockpile of more than 93,000 points. He had hoped to reach 100,000, telling me that his two teenagers had just started driving themselves to school. “I was holding on to these for my kids,” he says. “The whole idea was that they could get Dunkin’.” Then Dunkin’ started canceling points more than a year old. Braun, who is more serious about rewards than many people are—on our call, he mentions the Hertz and Lowe’s programs, remembers carrying the physical Starbucks card, and has held upper-tier status with JetBlue and Hilton—opened the app in the fall to find that his balance was off . . . by “about 63,800 points,” he says, equal to roughly $250 worth of coffees. He is hardly the only chain r…