Burger King’s Truly Excellent $5 A Month Coffee Subscription

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OK, sure, Burger King’s coffee isn’t the best on the planet (that is actually Jamaican Blue Mountain and don’t let anyone tell you different). But then everything is a trade off between price and quality so $5 a month for a month of coffee isn’t that bad at all.

Sure, it’s not all the coffee you might want, it’s the one cup a day. But it’s still not a bad deal for us consumers. And it’s an absolute bargain for Burger King:

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]When it comes to places to get your morning/afternoon/midnight coffee, the options are plentiful. If you’re looking for something extravagant, and probably overpriced, you go to a specialty coffee shop. If you’re looking for something fast, relatively straightforward and very cheap you go to a fast food chain like… Burger King. The royal burger maker is about to make getting coffee a bit less expensive with its new pay-per-month coffee subscription.[/perfectpullquote]

OK:

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Burger King is brewing up a breakfast war with an app-based deal that lets folks score a cup of coffee for as little as 17 cents, the fast-food giant said Friday.[/perfectpullquote]

If we look purely at the cost of making that coffee to sell, without any overheads, Burger King will be making a gross margin and even a profit at that price. Note that’s before all those fixed costs like the store, rent and so on. So it’s an addition to revenue. But that’s not all it is:

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Customers can buy the coffee subscription via the Burger King app. If you purchase the subscription deal, you can use the app to get a small cup of brewed coffee every day.[/perfectpullquote]

OK again, but to get your coffee you’ve got to go into a Burger King. What is the main aim of all the advertising that a fast food chain does? To get you to walk into the store. Footfall it’s called and it’s the Holy Grail. For it’s pretty obvious that once you’re in a fast food joint it’s going to be a heck of a lot easier to sell you something. A donut, an ice cream, a small burger for breakfast. Something.

So, look at this from the point of view of Burger King. The cost of the coffee, call that a wash either way. But they’ve just managed to get you to pay them to make sure that you turn up at a Burger King every day. Exactly the thing their entire ad budget is encouraging you to do anyway.

Marvellous marketing, a truly inspired idea.

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Jonathan Harston
Jonathan Harston
5 years ago

When doing field work my main options of eatery is BK or MacD, so I seek out BK whenever I can. I keep the reciept and as I’m waiting for the next image build to build I do the online discount thingy (I’m sat in front of a PC and would be otherwise staring into space, and it’s a good test of the internet connectivity) and get a free burger on the next journey. I also keep pestering them to class “ice cream” as an allowable “drink” in the meal combination – after a long day crawling under server racks… Read more »

Q46
Q46
5 years ago

In the US… going back a few years… eateries had signs outside ‘Breakfast including all you can drink coffee, $1,99’. The hook.

Breakfast would be one egg, couple of rashers of Canadian bacon and sausage patty.

Do you want fresh orange with that? Large or regular?
Two eggs?
Toast or English muffin? Butter and preserve?

These were add-ons and the $1,99 breakfast easily enough became $10 once the extras, tax and tip were added.

Rarely did I see anyone having just the $1,99 version.