How the coffee subscription ruined Pret

I have a deep-seated hatred of the hospitality QR code. It ripped through the industry as part of questionable social-distancing initiatives during the pandemic, taking the place of menus and human interaction – and has stubbornly refused to disappear, making my heart sink when I find one sellotaped to the table of a bar or restaurant. However, there’s one hospitality QR code that I found myself developing a fondness for – the one that comes with Pret a Manger’s coffee subscription.

Launched in September 2020, the scheme is a financial godsend for coffee addicts. For £25 a month, subscribers can order up to five ‘barista-made’ drinks per day (coffees, teas, frappes, hot chocolates, smoothies and so on) by flashing their QR code as payment, just as long as you don’t place more than one order within a 30-minute period. Given a flat white in my local Pret costs £3.10 and an Americano £2.90, it’s great value. If you were to rinse your subscription completely, you could guzzle more than £400 worth of flat whites every month for your £25 investment. Sign up to their loyalty scheme and they throw in a complimentary ‘perk’ every ten drinks too. With upwards of 300 Prets in Greater London alone, ‘convenient’ for the caffeine-dependent office-goer seems an understatement.

Yet, four months into my subscription, my once-loved daily coffee experience has soured. The immense success of the Pret subscription service is to be applauded – a national rollout within seven weeks of the idea being conceived provided financial stability during a highly challenging period. But for the customer, ordering a coffee in Pret has become chaotic, confusing and utterly infuriating.

Picture the scene. It’s a weekday. Clock ticks lunch hour. Swathes of subscribers march into their nearest Pret. A decent portion of them also browse for a salad, wrap or a sandwich. Orders are going strong; baristas are keeping up with the pace. That is until a critical turning point is reached. As the subscribers (and unwitting non-subscribers who don’t realise the chaos that awaits them) just keep pouring in, there comes a moment when demand simply exceeds capacity. Refusing entry to the shop is not an option, of course, so the number of staff manning the tills and taking orders tends to exceed the few staff making the drinks behind them.

As each new drink order pops up on the giant iPads baristas work their way through, their to-do list begins to look about as long as an NHS waiting list. More customers also means the steady burble of background noise grows – baristas find it harder to hear what the customer is ordering, and customers find it harder to hear when their drink is ready. Which means half of the drink orders are yelled out repeatedly across the room until a certain someone remembers they did in fact order an extra-hot oat milk caramel pumpkin-spiced latte.

The queue itself can often descend into disaster, too. With so many people congregating in one spot, it becomes somewhat of a mental sport to work out whether a person is waiting to be served, lingering awkwardly to collect their already-placed order, or simply browsing the granola pot selection. There is also some confusion about QR etiquette. A colleague and I attempted to rotate on coffee runs, using each other’s QR codes for efficiency. It seemed to be going smoothly till one day it was computer says no: both individuals must be present, apparently.

And with all this kerfuffle, there have been a handful of times I have simply not received my coffee. You find yourself standing and waiting, watching 15 or 20 minutes of your ‘quick’ coffee run tick by before finally catching someone’s attention to chase up your order and finding out that it’s vanished / was never made / was taken by another subscriber. It is not necessarily the fault of the baristas – they’re no octopuses. It’s that Pret’s attempt to modernise, simplify and digitalise a service has backfired on the overall customer – and employee – experience.

Similar scenes can be seen during the morning coffee rush, as commuters flood off trains and into Pret for their caffeine hit. The queues grow longer, the baristas grow more overwhelmed and the swarm of customers waiting for their order begins to take on a life of its own. It’s not helped by the fact that most of those in the queue aren’t just ordering a filter coffee, of course. The baristas are making turmeric lattes, matcha lattes, frappes, smoothies and all sorts of other concoctions that have little resemblance to a good old-fashioned cup of java.

So perhaps it should come as little surprise that the coffee subscription has taken its toll on the staff at Pret. Some even noted that the blending machines themselves struggle to churn out such a high quantity of frappe and smoothie orders.

Above all, though, it is the simple human interactions that diminish – almost without us noticing. Several weeks back, I was caught completely off-guard when one of the baristas asked if my day was going well. Stuttering slightly, I briefly forgot how to adequately respond to the question.

Now I avoid Pret at lunch completely. The safe hours are between 10 a.m. and 12 p.m., after the morning rush has died down, and from 3 p.m.onwards, once the lunchtime surge is over. If I really need my coffee during peak times, I’d rather spend £4 elsewhere than navigate the Pret maelstrom to use my subscription.

So is Pret doomed to be a victim of its own popularity – or is there a solution? I have an idea: slash the pompous frappe and smoothie orders from the subscription. Replace the seemingly unsustainable and ever-expanding choice of drinks with a short, succinct menu of actual coffee. It might give the Pret baristas the chance to catch their breath – and the rest of us the chance of getting the right order.