Upfront, dear customer and reader, especially in Europe, do your homework on General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In the USA and other countries, do some research on what laws your country has to protect you regarding data issues. Subscriptions of cheap coffees lure customers into freely giving their precious personal data for future marketing! More on this at the bottom of this post. But under GDPR you can request for your data 1. not be included on Pret’s database, or 2. if you did subscribe, upon unsubscribing you can request for your data to be DELETED and request to not be contacted with advertisement in the future!
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I have tweeted this before several times for people to not get lured into DM, mainly to keep the conversation public, but also because Pret wants customer data.
Pret sends little freebies in return for addresses.
If you want to unsubscribe from a website/newsletter but can’t find the feature, press F3 and enter into search “unsubscribe”.
Here is an eagle eye after my own heart:
You need to read the WHOLE text to spot it!
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Pret has started collecting customer data since around 2018. They never used to do that before. If you scan through Pret’s Tweets and replies, you will see a LOT of “Could you please DM us…”. And then in the DM, away from the public feed, Pret is luring customer data out of them for marketing! 😀
Try it!
UPDATE Dec. 2021:
A customer having a hard time unsubscribing from Pret’s marketing emails, and I’m not surprised at all. They captured it on video:
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UPDATE on Pret doing data collection now:
In a NY Times article CEO Pano Christou speaks open about data collection, quote:
»The other benefit of the subscription plan is the chance to gather more data about its customers, who will scan a QR code each time they use it. “Pret have been very, very late adapters to this,” Mr. Christou said. Panera, he said, has a database of more than 40 million customers across the United States. … I think the richness of data today gives you an opportunity to learn much more about your customers”« Link
UPDATE November 2021:
Pret also lure customers into DM to get their home addresses with the promise to “pop something in the post”, and since the pandemic, they don’t send anything but just collect addresses. One of MANY complaints on this:
Bullied during bereavement in Pret A Manger 