A high street hero in the Noughties, Pret has now put customer loyalty at risk with a subscription scheme that sometimes overpromises and underdelivers, and which, it is claimed, has dented the morale of the staff.
Club Pret, as the membership scheme is called, charges £30 per month, for which customers are entitled to five barista-made drinks per day, as well as a 20 per cent discount on food items.
Launched at the height of the pandemic in September 2020, it was designed to entice home workers away from their laptops and give the company a guaranteed income, rather like a football club selling season tickets.
From day one there were hints that demand might have outstripped expectations. Pret’s chief executive, Pano Christou, expected 2-3,000 people to sign up on the first day, but by 3pm that day the figure was already 16,500.
By April 2023, according to its own figures, the subscription scheme was being used 1.25million times per week.
Some in the industry see echoes of the Hoover free flights fiasco 30 years ago, when the vacuum cleaner firm offered flights to the US worth £600 for every purchase over £100 and had to renege on the offer when engagement far outstripped expectations.
With coffee costing upwards of £3 per cup, the scheme means members could slurp their way through £450 worth of drinks for £30 if they maxed out on the offer. In reality, of course, the viability of the scheme relies on the assumption that no one does, and that members will become so shackled to Pret for their caffeine hits that they will end up buying breakfast, lunch and snacks there every day too.
You don’t need to have the deviousness of a career criminal to work out the obvious flaw in the system: if you are entitled to five drinks per day but only want one or two, why not claim the others for your family, friends or colleagues? Better still, why not split the cost of one membership with other people to get your one or two daily drinks for £15 or £10 a month each?
And that is exactly what happened, until Pret put a stop to it earlier this year by forcing customers to log in to its own app every time they want to claim their allocated drinks or discounts, which prevented people from using screenshots of each others’ QR codes.
Glitches with the updated system, though, have driven some customers to distraction because of difficulties in logging in to the app and loyalty bonuses that mysteriously disappear.
There have been tales of staff switching off machines for making iced coffee – and telling customers they are broken – because they simply can’t make the drinks fast enough to meet demand. Some customers complain that their favourite drinks are never available.
“It has put the members of staff under almost unbelievable pressure,” one former Pret employee says. “They suddenly threw thousands of extra people at the staff without the right equipment to cope with the demand.
“It has been heartbreaking for the staff and for the customers because trust and loyalty between them were always very important. Now the staff are having to deal with a good many people feeling upset.”
Pret has previously admitted that “a few customers may have experienced technical issues in accessing their new codes” and that anyone with problems could “contact our customer support team who will be happy to help”.
They later added: “Since we made this change in March, our team have either given refunds or applied the Club Pret discount as normal to any customers who have genuinely struggled to log in.”
Robert Johnson is a UK-based business writer specializing in finance and entrepreneurship. With an eye for market trends and a keen interest in the corporate world, he offers readers valuable insights into business developments.
