Since 2013 many of us have enjoyed the free hot drinks from their stores when a My-Waitrose card was scanned, our local store in Milton Keynes has a policy in place for nearly 6 months that a £10 minimum spend was required before you got the free coffee, tea etc.
But this week the news has hit the main press as another 8 stores have made the change with other stores presumably ready to make the change.
No more free Waitrose coffee? This truely is a broken Britain. What’s the point? Life as we know it is over [@mfbmatthew]
Billericay, Bury St Edmunds, Clifton, Leigh-on-Sea, Mountsorrel, Norwich, Southend and Swaffham are the 8 stores with the ‘new trial’.
This change has come after some customers supposedly were complaining it was ‘like a soup kitchen’ and ‘attracted chavs’.
Waitrose had this to say:
Our myWaitrose free tea and coffee offer is one of the ways we thank our customers for shopping with us – and we want all our customers to be able to enjoy a free hot drink when they shop with us in our branches.
The trial in eight of our shops simply asks customers to confirm they’ve made a purchase, before picking up their free coffee.
There’s no minimum spend for this purchase.
This is not the first time there has been controversy over the drinks:
In 2013, Gilly Chu, owner of Gilly’s Cafe in the high street, Nailsea, Bristol, said the decision to give hot drinks away had resulted in her morning hot drink trade plummeting by more than 50 per cent.
In 2014 customers were becoming ill after they were accidentally drinking cleaning fluid from the coffee machines.
