I’ve been loyal to Gail’s for eight years. They’ve been indifferent to me for all of them. This is the relationship I deserve.
Before the brand police took over the marketing department, I clearly remember someone saying that O2 didn’t want ‘customers’ it wanted ‘fans’. Since then, there has been a drive for every business “serious about its future” to ensure that it created something called “loyalty.” Loyalty is a dangerous and slightly absurd term to be used in commerce. I was loyal to my local dry cleaners, whom I dropped in on regularly on the way home, welcomed his new wife to the business a few years later, and even their first child. And then we moved, and I never went back because I could get my dry cleaning closer. I was loyal in a very loose, transactional sense that would be defined by most people as ‘not loyal.’
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And now I have the digital graveyard equivalent of my derision. 83 loyalty apps. I am the most faithful man in the United Kingdom. I have not paid full price for a baguette since the Jubilee. Although, and this may surprise you, the folder on my phone containing these loyalty apps is labelled…. “Poly-loyalty.” Loyalty cannot be defined by stamps; otherwise, the post office would not have been put through what it has been.
The problem with these apps, or the little cardboard emblems we carry more carefully than our own driving license, is that they make me wonder whether any of them really know the truth. I have a punch card from Press that sits snuggly next to the half-finished Caffé Nero one, and I think they are communicating with the Mafia of organised grime. I live in perpetual fear of waking up to a horse head, rendered in high-contrast latte foam on my pillow. Some data analyst working from a bedsit in Shoreditch is highlighting my name because I haven’t bought a cinnamon bun in three weeks with a three-word message: “Send the Guys.”
Are they rewarding my return or, as is my experience at Gail’s, carefully monitoring my activities and treating me accordingly? The adulterer.
The only reason I got the app in the first place was because of the free coffee at the other end. What does that say about my loyalty? Is that what loyalty is now? A transaction? Why can’t we call it something else? We have this, or the membership thing. Which is basically pre-buying coffees. “I know I’m going to be tired next Wednesday around 1pm. Have my oat latte ready.”
Ok, let me be honest, it was the free coffee and the opportunity not to have to queue. The greatest thing to become a motivation for businesses is the ‘frictionless experience.’ I can finally reach a flow state. Flow state, in my case, is seamlessly drop by a Starbucks on my way to a Gail’s to seamlessly grab a cinnamon bun on my way to a thing. I have left the perfect amount of time and do not have capacity to deal with speaking an order and then waiting for it.
This is the ideal.
The reality is that the frictionless workflow that millions have been spent on designing and deploying has been entirely ignored by the staff. I walk in with an order number, and they stare at me with the look of a person who wonders why a poodle has gained sentience and is expecting microfoam in a cup.
They can see the professional courier with his large insulated cube on his back like a human escapee from Tetris. I am not a representative of the social equivalent of the barista, the gig economy community that supported this invisible visitor through lockdowns. I am also not a ‘real’ customer, despite my brandishing of the app that says I am “valued.” If I am valued it is by people that have expressed the words from afar and failed to consult the local shop staff who would choose another term; e.g. an interference, an irritation, a scab.
But is this not why we secretly love the local Gail’s? Hostility is the premium service we must receive. In a city obsessed with “Good Vibes Only,” their neon sign has a large red line through it; a sanctuary of indifference. I stare longingly at my Free Birthday Croissant email, don protective clothing and head over to the till.
Am I loyal. Yes. I have the proof. The data. The QR CODE!
Do they care?
No.
In a world where every brand is trying to be your friend, where every app is trying to personalise your experience, where every barista is trained to remember your name and your order, Gail’s just wants you to buy bread and leave.
