by Henry VIII downloads a coffee loyalty app and discovers his oat milk costs extra
I once had coffee, imported at great expense, brought to my chamber by a servant sworn to secrecy about the price. This morning I paid four pounds ninety for a flat white and the app still asked me to round up for charity.
The Queue
I joined a queue of nine people, all silently scrolling their phones with the specific stillness of men awaiting an audience, and reached the counter to be asked, before anything else, whether I had the loyalty app. I did not. The barista, a young woman named Freya, seemed genuinely disappointed on my behalf, as though I had turned up to a coronation without a crown.
The Download
I downloaded the app on the spot, granting it access to my location, my camera, and my payment details, three permissions I would not have granted a foreign ambassador without a written treaty first. In exchange it promised me a free coffee after every ninth purchase, a loyalty scheme considerably less generous than anything I offered men who actually fought for me at Boulogne.
The Upcharge
I ordered a flat white with oat milk and was informed this would cost an additional sixty pence, a fee applied, Freya explained, because oat milk costs the shop more than dairy. I asked whether I might instead be charged less for choosing the cheaper option, dairy, and Freya said that is not how it works, and I understood immediately that I had just encountered the first pricing structure in this country more confusing than Tudor coinage.
The Personalisation
The app asked me to name my regular order so it could remember it for next time, and I named it the usual, thinking myself terribly clever, only to discover forty minutes later that six other customers that week had also named their order the usual, and the app had cheerfully confused mine with a large iced matcha belonging to a stranger named Priyanka, who I sincerely hope enjoyed my flat white.
The Point Total
I have now visited the same shop eleven times purely to accumulate points toward my free coffee, a pursuit with more genuine dedication than I gave most treaties I actually signed. Freya tells me I need seven more visits. I once waited seven years for an annulment from Rome and received it eventually through sheer persistence. I fully intend to apply the same persistence here, and I expect, frankly, a better outcome from the coffee shop than I ever got from the Pope.
The Ninth Visit
Freya tells me regulars eventually stop counting stamps altogether and simply trust the app to notify them, a level of faith I am not yet prepared to extend to any institution, digital or otherwise, having been betrayed by rather more powerful ones in my time. I intend to count every single stamp personally, out loud if necessary, until that free coffee is mine, at which point I fully expect to feel less triumphant than the seven years of waiting will have earned me.
Freya would fit in nicely alongside the rest of my diet plan, oat milk upcharge and all. Further reading on the wider chaos of modern Britain: the definitive guide to London’s most judgmental baristas, croissants now priced at six pounds on principle alone, the full eyewitness account of how I came back in the first place.
