I drink a lot of coffee and try to drink locally at places like Coffee Tepuy, but I have a Costa Coffee and a Caffe Nero loyalty app on my phone.
In particular, I have the Nero app because I get a free coffee through Octopus and another through Vitality every week.
Rival Christmas offers
Costa are giving members a free bonus stamp with each coffee they order. For every ten stamps/beans I have, I’ll get a free cup of coffee. My drink is a large Americano with syrup, that’s £4.10, so each stamp is worth £0.41.
Nero are giving members a free Christmas cracker with each coffee they order. A cracker might contain nothing, a stamp, and another prize, such as a holiday worth £2,500.
So, do I get a coffee from Costa or Nero?
In this spreadsheet, I’m cracking the successes or failures of my Nero orders. You’ll be able to see whether the odds suggest you should gamble for a cracker or stay safe with a Costa bean.
Nero versus Costa Christmas results
Caffe Nero has to beat the £0.41 guaranteed value of an extra bean I’ll get at Costa. This won’t be a steady race, it’ll jump around if/when I get any bigger prices from Nero.
At the start of this blog post, I said I prefer local shops, and it’s worth pointing out that many have loyalty programs. I’ve only ever had “aww, because you’re a regular freebies”‘ in indies.
If you’re curious, Costa is a British company and over 50 years old. According to Wikipedia, it’s currently owned by the Coca-Cola Company. Gosh. I’m not a fan of Coca-Cola because of their sponsorship choices but it’s clearly not a deal breaker for me here.
Nero is also British, also from London, and born from a takeover of some London coffee houses in 1997.
Costa has nearly 4,000 locations (Wikipedia data, again) and revenue over £1 billion. Nero only has about 1,000 and revenue of £200 million.
P.S. If you don’t hate this sort of analysis, I’ve even more data on protein bars!
Image credit: Mikesh Kaos via Unsplash.
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Love a bit of number crunching, looking forward to seeing the results of this.
Are you getting a stamp for every Costa drink? I only get an extra one if I bring my own cup but nothing more than that. What is your secret?!
I get one bean for every order, generally forget my own cup even when it’s in my bag but right now there’s the festive bonus bean which does seem to be working as advertised.
I’m not so sure I’m getting a Nero Cracker when I should. They announced Vitality was in the scheme today, I used a Vitality voucher today and didn’t (not yet anyway) got a cracker.
Oh, they do say you don’t get a cracker with a voucher redemption. I get a £1 coffee from them with three mobile and don’t get a cracker for that one. But I reckon I get something (usually one bonus stamp) about one in two times when I do get one.
I think you’re right. I used a voucher again this weekend and no cracker.
Also, you only need 9 stamps to get a free coffee at Nero so 45p equivalent for a stamp?
Oh my god I’m so boring!
I’ve wrestled with this one… I think the benchmark to beat is Costa.