9 Lies My OCD Has Told Me
OCD is a devious and sneaky creature, frequently manipulating people to get its own way.
Browse links
US residents can opt out of "sales" of personal data.
Lily Bailey
Journalist. Mental health awareness warrior. Lover of dogs. Lifelong city girl, lunchtime philosopher, general adventurer extraordinaire
Latest Posts
Pret Staff Are Giving Out Free Coffees To Customers They Like: But Is It A Good Idea?
My boyfriend and I, we have a routine. Every morning we get up at 6.45am to go to work. We leave the house, go to Pret and grab breakfast. Then we get in the car and drive. This worked well, until a few months back, when the barista, a sparky, petite young woman with a wash of bright red hair, who I’ll call Lucy, started giving us everything for free. Now don’t get me wrong: I love a freebie. But this was getting out of hand. Every morning Lucy would bag our items (an order which usually came to £8.50), hand them to us with a big grin, and trill “on the house!” Fellow diners were shooting us daggers. “What makes you so special?” I could see them thinking. I couldn’t blame them. We were wondering the same thing. At this point, Pret’s latest marketing strategy, where baristas are encouraged to give out free stuff to customers, was not public knowledge. We racked our brains, but drew blanks. Mr boyfriend was adamant that she was trying to seduce us into a threesome. Me, I wasn’t sure. After a few months of this treatment, my boyfriend could take it no more. “I can’t go in there again,” he said. “I feel like she’s stealing from the company and is going to end up in big trouble. And I don’t like the way everyone else looks at us. I’m just going to wait in the car from now on.” So I was left to fly solo on the daily Pret mission. Things continued as normal, until a few weeks later, when I broke my heel and ended up on crutches. Suddenly something odd was happening: in every Pret I went to throughout London, everyone was giving me stuff for free. How could this be? Was Lucy ringing ahead? Weirder still, when I came off my crutches, the complimentary treatment at every franchise stopped dead in its tracks, just as mysteriously as it had begun. Needless to say, I was puzzled, until a few months later, when Pret’s chief executive Clive Schlee announced that Pret’s policy is to give free food or drinks to the customers they like best. “We looked at loyalty cards but we didn’t want to spend all that money building up some complicated Clubcard-style analysis” Schlee told the Evening Standard. “Instead the staff have to give away a certain number of hot drinks and food every week. They will decide ‘I like the person on the bicycle’ or ‘I like the guy in that tie’ or ‘I fancy that girl or that boy’. It means 28 per cent of people have had something free. It’s a nice, different way of doing it.” But is it nice? I couldn’t help but wonder. In the first instance, I felt a little betrayed by Lucy. All this time, I’d been torn between worrying I was putting her job on the line, whilst secretly quite liking feeling special, and now it turned out that both those emotions were simply born of a brand-wide corporate strategy. Did Lucy really like us as much as it had seemed, or were those huge smiles just fake too? “I just don’t even know what was real and what wasn’t anymore,” I lamented to my boyfriend, realising this line echoed with all the melodrama or a break up. It surprises me that Schlee has even made the strategy public knowledge. Surely he realises that the admission totally kills the spontaneity and feel-good factor of the action, whilst seriously cheesing off everyone who goes into Pret and doesn’t get the VIP treatment? My second thought was whether the strategy was even legal. Is doesn’t seem particularly egalitarian to encourage staff to give out free stuff to people they fancy. If that’s how it’s being run, we may as well form two queues: “hot people in this line, mediocre people over there.” Equally, if baristas across London had been serenading me with freebies when I was on crutches, are they also giving them to everyone in wheelchairs, or anyone with an apparent physical disability? Surely that sort of positive discrimination has the possibility to become extremely patronising and wearing. People with disabilities are just as human as anyone else, and fight with vigour and determination to be seen this way. Do they really want baristas making a show of awarding them free coffee all the time as some kind of congratulatory prize just for making it through the doors? I think not. Last Friday, I got up as usual and went to the Pret across the road to get coffee. Lucy has now left, but her predecessors continue to dole out free stuff. Only today was different. The man in front of me was given his coffee ‘on the house’ by a new member of the Pret team. I was served by the same barista, who ran my stuff through the til and billed me for it. I was aghast. Am I not looking so good today? Did I not smile as nicely as usual? Oh no, they don’t like me anymore! So now, as I reach into my purse to find my card, I am feeling negative about paying for something, even though everywhere else I buy things, I willingly accept that that is the role of the consumer. Well done Pret. Smart strategy.
Posts1 - 2