A friend recently shared a random life hack that I took advantage of this morning: Einstein Bros. Bagels doesn’t verify your account on their app. I downloaded their app, created an account using a made up email (that I don’t even know if it exists), a random password (that I’ll never have to remember), and a random phone number. They do check to see if that phone number has been used before, and I’m sure that they verify that the email address isn’t already tied to an account, but I never once had to do any verification to say that I owned that phone number or email.

This is important because Einstein automatically gives you a “free bagel + shmear with purchase” coupon when you create an account, and they also give you a “free egg sandwich with purchase” coupon on your birthday. My purchase was a bottle of water; the other catch is that on the mobile app you need to add funds in a minimum increment of $5. The funny thing is that since I can use Apple Pay, they’ll never receive my actual credit card number; every time I make a different account and load it up with $5 it’ll always appear to be a different account. Perhaps their data scientists could have spotted a trend with certain credit cards constantly loading $5 onto accounts; now that information will blend in with the rest of the legitimate accounts that are genuinely loading $5 on for their purchases. I guess they’ll just have to realize that their Austin locations are seeing an uptick in the utilization of certain coupon codes. If you order in person, you wouldn’t even be locked into paying $5.

In other news, I’m a big fan of the Santa Fe Egg White Sandwich.