Brewing up a free-tea storm in Waitrose

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/30/waitrose-free-drinks-storm-tea-coffee-etiquette

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Loyalty cards are a mystery to me. I feel loyalty to people, causes and sometimes places, but rarely to shops. I’ve never had a points card, and I know well the contempt of the shop assistant who asks for one and finds you wanting. “You have your discounts, I’ll keep my data,” I tend to think (as I adjust my foil hat in the mirror).

But the Waitrose loyalty card has been harder to resist. Free newspapers! Free tea or coffee! Only the fact that I don’t drink tea or coffee has held me back. If they ever extend it to free gin, my points-shunning will be over just as my Hogarthian descent will be assured. Luckily for my principles, it looks like the card is becoming less desirable, not more.

Waitrose has announced a rule change, which means that if you want to park up in one of their cafes, you can’t do so if you’re just quaffing the free coffee. You’ll need to buy some sort of snack as well. A free treat now comes with strings attached; but if you’re going to stipulate conditions, forcing people to buy themselves a biscuit is definitely at the benign end of the scale.

Accusations abound, with a suggestion that Waitrose has responded to a middle-class snit from its core customers who didn’t like the stores filling up with less fancy people on freebies. But Waitrose has denied such snootiness, instead suggesting that it’s all about etiquette.

And perhaps that’s true. There is something deeply irritating about going into a cafe and finding every table occupied by people who are visibly eating and drinking nothing. Though I don’t think free coffee has much to do with it: the guiltiest parties in my neck of the woods are certainly not short of cash to buy themselves a latte or two. What they are short of, it appears, is office space.

Which is why they commandeer a table, set up enough computing equipment to resemble air-traffic control, and adopt an expression of bemusement if a waitress asks them to move up so someone can sit down and consume actual food.

So surely Waitrose is being sneaky: by presenting its decision as one of courtesy rather than economy, it is allowing everyone to think the problem is with someone else. And no doubt table-hoggers will still hog, but at least they’ll buy something first.

Blue whale forensics

The Natural History Museum has announced that the dinosaur that guards its entrance is to be swapped for a blue whale skeleton. I blame Night at the Museum, which has given us unreasonably high expectations of lobby-based dinosaurs.

I once accepted an invitation to an after-hours party at the museum, precisely because I had subconsciously assumed that the night guards would include Dick Van Dyke. But now I might go back and try instead to spot Sir Michael Dixon, director of the museum. When asked about the relevance of the research it does, he mentioned forensic work, helping the police, as well as disease research. “We’re not just nerdy guys who can identify every species of butterfly,” he said, leaving us in no doubt that they can totally do that as well.