Power to the baristas. How this coffee shop revolution can benefit everyone
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Version 0 of 1. Fancy a free high-street chain coffee? Well who wouldn’t, except maybe people who actually like coffee, rather than flavoured milk in a sippy cup. But I digress. Egos nationwide have been crushed by this week’s revelation that if you’ve ever been given a double espresso on the house in Pret a Manger it wasn’t because of your irresistible sexual magnetism, nor even because by going there twice a day you’ve become like a friend to them, but because of a corporate policy mandating staff to give out a set number of freebies a week. Dammit. The best explanation for all this would be that Pret is not actually a posh fast food joint at all, but an undercover sociology lab set up by academics who devised this groundbreaking method of investigating altruistic impulses when their grants ran out, and who now believe the future of scientific research lies in funding it via selling crayfish salad. Because there’s surely a doctoral thesis to be had in untangling the complex emotional transactions that determine who gets the free lattes. (Not me, it should be said in the interests of scientific rigour. Admittedly I work a lot from home and so mostly make my own coffee, but still, I can’t help feeling faintly aggrieved.) Related: Smiling or crying: which one got me a free coffee at Pret? Good-looking people presumably get lucky unfairly often in Pret, just as they’re popularly supposed to do when up in front of juries or negotiating pay rises. But reports of, for example, a Portuguese-speaking couple who got a freebie off a Portuguese-born barista suggests more subtle factors at work here than hotness. Do staff subconsciously look more favourably on those in their own age range, or those of the same skin colour or nationality? Is there an old boys network in flat whites, or an element of female solidarity? Is it like marriage, and they choose someone whose faint resemblance to them is obvious to their friends, if not to them? Are staff more likely to take pity on weepy people who look like they could use a break or, more cynically, to favour confident types who seem likely to maximise the marketing potential by bragging to their friends about it? Do the attitudes of baristas fluctuate in boom times and recession, in line with national sympathy for immigrants and welfare claimants? And yet you wonder if the knock-on benefit to customers isn’t actually a red herring here. As long as it operated under the radar, this scheme was – like Starbucks’ faintly stalkerish obsession with writing your name on the cups – presumably just another cynical marketing strategy for pretending that a suburban sandwich outlet is really a funky independent neighbourhood coffee shop, and you are the cast of Friends. But, wittingly or unwittingly, by going public about it, chief executive Clive Schee has changed the deal. It’s no longer punters they’re ultimately rewarding here, but their staff. Think about it. Advertise the fact that your staff are allowed to give things away if people are nice to them, and what’s the most likely, if possibly temporary, effect? People will be nicer to your staff. They may, depending on how far they’re prepared to sacrifice all self-respect for a free muffin, flirt a bit; at the very least they’re more likely to make eye contact, or smile, or not talk loudly to someone else on their mobile at the same time as ordering. The balance of power shifts in interesting ways when the most junior barista has the discretion to reward (or not) a City suit. Nobody wants a return to the Fawlty Towers-era of customers being always wrong. But if freebies make people even slightly more likely to treat those in service industries not as faceless minimum wage flunkies but as human beings – well, frankly it’s hard to see how that can be a bad thing for anyone concerned. Or why we shouldn’t explore ways of extending power to people in other low-paid, stressful, faintly demoralising jobs – call centre staff, say, or shop assistants – where the worst part of the working day is often other people’s snotty, high-handed reactions to you. Discretionary rewards are, after all, something we associate with seniority. Complain in a restaurant and usually it won’t be the harassed waitress who knocks something off the bill but the maitre d’. You can berate some customer services lackey about your frozen broadband all you like, but only when they eventually escalate you to some mysterious higher power will anything actually happen. But if you give junior staff the same opportunity to play God occasionally, there may be wider benefits than customers learning to treat them with a smidgin more respect. Related: Pret staff's free coffee for people they like: discrimination or a nice gesture? The classic text here is the epidemiologist Professor Sir Michael Marmot’s famous Whitehall study, examining stress and associated health risks in civil servants. The most vulnerable turned out to be not those right at the top, presumably working the longest hours and shouldering the most daunting responsibilities, but those on lower grades. Their greater job stress was associated with greater risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, and even mortality, and although drinking and smoking habits explained some of their poorer health, it did not explain everything. The theory was that control of destiny also matters; that feeling as if you don’t have much influence over events is bad for your stress levels and ergo your health. Perhaps one reason flexible working practices have been shown to boost productivity is that most of us thrive on feeling like we have some control over our time. Punching a clock, or obeying an inanely rigid formula for interacting with every customer, makes us feel resentful and rebellious and not particularly inclined to go the extra mile. Good managers who trust their staff enough to give them some autonomy might have a more profound impact than we think. The Pret strategy wouldn’t suit every industry, obviously. Coffees can be safely given away gratis precisely because they’re a luxury nobody really needs; the same isn’t true of a week’s shopping at Tesco. But at the risk of sounding twee, where it could be made to work, why ever would you not reward niceness for a change? Why not buck what is so often the norm, where the rudest and most aggressive complainers absorb all the attention while the faultlessly polite get fobbed off with crummy service – and where cynical corporate stunts only ever seem to benefit those at the top? Perhaps there is occasionally such a thing as a free lunch, after all. |