THE $120 CUP OF COFFEE
Today I cancelled my Unlimited Sip Club account at Panera. That doesn’t sound like much of a feat, but for me it is huge.
When my wife Kathe became ill at just about this time two years ago she needed constant attention and constant support for the five months until we discovered she had pancreatic cancer. She died three weeks later in May, 2021.
My daughter Susie would spell me when she could and when she did, when the weather was warm enough, I would go to Panera Bread Company, close by, and sit outside and drink a cup of coffee. It was a way to unwind. Sometime in that period Panera offered a coffee subscription plan with free coffee for an introductory period and from then on offered a coffee subscription for $9.95 a month. Since their coffee was a little pricey and I went a number of times a month, this seemed like a good deal. So I signed up and for a year or more during the pandemic enjoyed sitting out side Panera drinking coffee.
But starting in October a year ago I began to travel overseas and this last year have been away for about six months. So I decided to cancel my coffee subscription. But I was unable to. My combination of email and password wouldn’t work and I was unable to reset the password. It was only on the 28th of each month when I discovered that I had made another payment that I tried to cancel my subscription, or I would note the payment and try briefly and then thinking I had a month to figure it out forget about it for another month. The Panera Bread website is set up first of all to sell me something, not to let me cancel. And any complaints led to a page with a dozen questions with automatic answers, none of which were useful. All I needed to do was sign in and cancel. But I couldn’t sign in. No combination of name and password, even though I had stored my passwords, would get me in. People at my local Panera had no idea what to do.
Finally in great frustration I vented somehow on line and did get a response from a person who promised that my account was cancelled.
The next month I discovered that I had made another payment and then I traveled and forgot about it and paid another payment, came back and discovered another payment and I guess finally gave up and realized I would be paying for life. In this entire time I didn’t get another cup of Panera Coffee. By this time the bill for the missing cup of coffee had climbed to about $120 in monthly payments. I can make a cup of Aldi coffee for two and a half cents.
So today I tried a little harder and this time, quite by accident, ran across a webpage with a phone number, which I called. After a long speech about how I would be better off going to their webpage, a young woman answered. I discovered she was calling from somewhere in Missouri. She looked and looked and finally said she had found the account and it had been closed in 2020. Then she wanted to know my phone number and told me that it was linked to the closed account. And then, finally, the light began to dawn. After Kathe died I had replaced my phone number with Kathe’s phone number, the number we had had for fifty years. And when this woman searched some more she found a second phone number, my old phone number, which was the way of identifying my account, the number I gave at the counter to get my free cup of subscription coffee every time I came in. I had managed to get two accounts, one closed when I got furious a year ago, another one still functioning but with the phone number as identification that I had long forgotten. Very easily she closed both accounts, asking if I wanted to keep it open until the 28th so that I could, I presume, get that last cup of coffee for which I had paid over $120. I declined, I wanted out.
I don’t know what the moral of this story is. I guess the most important discovery was that I was a damn fool for letting this run on for so long. A second significant point is that every time I sign up for some reduced introductory offer I should know that I will miss the point when the full price kicks in and I am trapped. The free introductory offer from Spectrum or the Washington Post or Panera will always cost me dearly. A third thing I’ve realized is that, as Don Collins insisted, computer’s can’t think. They don’t forget either. Once a number is entered, it sticks, any mistakes the computer makes are mistakes that someone entered in. Garbage in, garbage out. It was me who changed my phone number and who somehow signed up for two accounts at the same time which caused all this confusion.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 