Brief (coffeeyo.com): A cup of coffee can carry three different prices — dine-in, self-pickup and app-order — and figuring out which to use has become oddly complicated. Behind the pricing maze is a simple trade: merchants hand you a discount in exchange for your behavior data and a long-term, trackable relationship.
This article is reprinted from the Economic Daily.
Many office workers have made a daily cup of coffee a habit, but how to buy it more economically? Open a delivery app and you’ll find the item price plus a delivery fee comes to twenty or thirty yuan. The page shows that if you simply walk over and pick it up yourself, you can save several yuan. For the very same cup of coffee, walking a short distance can save you a fair amount.
Yet oddly, in a different scenario — when you are already standing in the store — the merchant will again encourage you to pull out your phone and place the order online via an app or mini-program: first order minus 5 yuan, member price a bit cheaper still. Even with the espresso machine right in front of you, tapping your phone twice is still a better deal than ordering and paying directly at the counter.
The coffee is still the same coffee; switching delivery to self-pickup, or being in-store yet urged to order online — why make it so complicated?
Self-pickup being cheaper than waiting for delivery is very simple. A delivery order carries costs such as platform commissions and rider fees. When consumers pick up themselves, they save the merchant those costs. Passing some of the savings to consumers naturally brings the coffee price down. The merchant cuts costs, the consumer saves money — a win-win all around.
So why, even in-store, does the merchant still push app or mini-program ordering? By then, what the merchant cares about is no longer just that cup of coffee.
When spending offline, the consumer pays, gets the coffee, and the transaction with that store ends. The merchant has no idea when the consumer will return, what their taste preference is, or how price-sensitive they are — leaving it in a relatively passive position. Once the consumer downloads the merchant’s app or registers as a member on the mini-program, even just for a first-order discount, they are no longer a passerby but become a “digital identity” in the backend database that can be reached and tracked: their taste preferences, ordering times and purchase frequency are all recorded bit by bit. Processed, this data becomes a precise user profile.
In the digital age, data assets are core assets for many merchants. With them, a merchant can proactively push various promotions and friendly reminders, even sending a free-drink coupon on the eve of your birthday. A few electronic coupons turn a one-off transaction into a long-term relationship of repeated touchpoints and ongoing operation — far more efficient than shouting through a loudspeaker on the street or handing out flyers aimlessly. Using “whether one is willing to spend time downloading, registering and claiming coupons” to distinguish customers — those who spend time to save a few yuan versus those who find it troublesome and pay directly at the counter — is exactly how they get screened out. Price itself is the most precise discriminator.
Once a merchant accumulates enough data assets, it can build more precise and effective products and services. For example, use low online prices to attract traffic, then recover margins by recommending differentiated, higher-margin baked pastries; or lock in future consumption through co-branded coupons and subscriptions to capture long-term value — KFC’s “Da Shen Card” and McDonald’s coffee card both follow this logic. The latter has two more benefits: one, prepaid cash flow; two, having bought the card, you’ve got to use it to break even, so the breakfast one might or might not have bought becomes a high-frequency habit.
For the merchant, a discount is both a concession and an investment — an “entry ticket” trading short-term profit for a long-term customer relationship. For the consumer, it is exchanging personal behavioral data and a future spending commitment for hidden benefits such as coupons and member prices.
One cup of coffee, three prices, is essentially three kinds of exchange — trading money for convenience, time for thrift, and data for a discount. So next time we open the app again, or stand at the counter and raise our phone to scan a code, we might think one step further: what exactly is today’s cup of coffee paid for?
Source: Economic Daily (September 19, 2026, page 9; author Li Qize). Original title: “A Cup of Coffee Can Sell at Three Prices.”
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