Watch out Yes Plz, there’s a new coffee subscription king in town. A Burger King. As reported by The Takeout, Burger King, the home of the Whopper and suspect grill lines on meat, is now offering customers a new type of coffee subscription service. It’s called the BK Café Subscription Program, and it’ll net you one cup of coffee a day for only five bucks a month.
The deal is fairly straightforward: for five dollars paid monthly, participants in the United States are entitled to one small coffee a day, available at any time they are open at participating stores, which sounds like that’s the catch, but a Burger King rep says the deal is available at “every BK location outside of Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico.” To sign up, all folks have to do it download the BK mobile app (because of course Burger King has an app and of course that’s how you have to signup for this thing).
While there is no fine print, there are a few catches. For one, the program only applies to small, 12oz black coffees. And these daily coffees are use-it-or-lose-it. If you miss Monday’s coffee, you don’t get two coffees on Tuesday, nor could you stop in to two different Burger Kings on Tuesday to redeem one coffee at each stop.
According to Fastfoodmenuprices.com, a small coffee at BK costs $1, meaning you’ll have to five separate days just to break even, which someone seems like that many times to visit a place to get coffee and entirely too many times to visit a Burger King in a month.
The charbroiled gambit, according to The Takeout, is to lure in people—especially the McCafe crowd—with the repeated promise of cheap coffee (“the more you come in, the cheaper it gets,” they are presumably saying) with the hopes that while they are in store filling up on BK joe, they might as well grab a nice croissan’wich or some order of magnitude of Whopper.
Erika Vonie, Coffee Masters Champion and Director of Coffee for Trade Coffee commented on Twitter:
$5/month for a small coffee in-store. Love to see commodity continue to drive down the price of coffee even further, and perpetuate to consumers that coffee should cost next to nothing, with an incredibly superior marketing reach than all of us combined. https://t.co/NmKa268aw7
— EV (@OkAn_EerieEvil) March 18, 2019
Twitter user and self-described “passionate #CoffeeHunter” Brian Gaffney added:
This flat-rate model positions coffee as a loss leader for them. Truth is, the real loss is happening at farm level. Assuming one small coffee (12 oz) three times per week is 144 oz per month. No one can both love coffee and be okay spending $0.035 / oz for it.
— brian gaffney (@bagaffney) March 19, 2019
I have to be honest, this deal ain’t for me. I’d rather pay $5 for a poorly made pour-over than live with the existential crisis of “should I? I mean, it’s already paid for? Maybe with all this money I’m saving I’ll buy an Eggnormous Burrito.” And quite frankly, my heart belongs to another. Even if Whataburger’s coffee tastes twice as bad as is three times as expensive, it’s a small price to pay for the opportunity to eat a chicken honey butter biscuit.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
Top image via Burger King.
