Beverages and Coffee Cards

I have been looking to try as many new things as I can recently. When I ask what people have to drink at the hawker stalls, I generally pick the one that I can’t understand. When I’m in the food centres, more notably Sheing Song (a malaysian lower cost group of stores, with more local foodstuffs) I’m drawn to the cans and bottles that I can’t quite read or which have fantastic names.


Two interesting drinks I discovered this way are firstly Kickapoo Joy Juice (I kid you not, a superb name)– a Singaporean drink of water, sugar, tartrazine and caffeine. That’s it, that’s all it is. It’s not worth mentioning that there is a diet version, as I’m not at all worried about the sugar content. Pouring it out, Yikes! It’s bright green! It’s something like Mountain Dew or Pib, highly caffeinated drinks I’ve had in the US. Secondly but no less colourful is Bandung – a drink I chanced upon at the East Coast/Eunos hawker centre. It’s hot pink, honestly, hot pink and super sweet. Flavour wise it is liquid turkish delight, a slightly milky, aromatic rose water drink that would go well with anything really spicy. I had it with bak kut teh in a rich gravy. Not quite the perfect match.Other good drinks taken so far are lime juice, wonderfully refreshing, sugar cane juice, freshly squeezed from two-feet-long canes and something that I think is rice-water.


Now to coffee cards. Gosh, I shake my head. The expansion of coffee houses here is astonishing; the market-place harkens back to the Spanish Royal court when the Conquistadors returned with the cocoa bean and some luke warm water from the Americas. Starbucks, The Coffee Connoisseur, Coffee Bean to name but three major chains, drip out the black stuff like a texan gusher. The range of drinks is bursting the seams of the cardboard cup holders, with green teas, chai teas, soy latte and as I heard this weekend, a soy, green tea latte. No, don’t ask. Don’t try, just order a coffee.


To my point, you’d think the market would be tripping over itself to garner addict’s loyalty to their bean of choice using the innoquous coffee card, tucked into your wallet, stamped and traded like Panini football stickers in a ten year-old’s playground. I was conditioned, I had the expectation to buy nine and tenth is free. Simple, effective, easy. It fits into your working week, anything else is a bonus. It reasonably means that a one-a-day regular enjoys a free cup of coffee every two weeks.


I asked at one reputable establishment this morning how their card worked. As per the deposit culture, you pay S$1.50 upfront (non refundable) and for every dollar you spend you get one point. Each point, I was told is just like cash and when you reach 500 points you can redeem them. Wow, sounds good, doesn’t it! I asked how much cash 500 points gets you. Five bucks. Five measly dollars. That’s a 1% rebate on your money. Which, to be honest isn’t bad compared to the bank’s interest rates of 0.1% (even on savings accounts).
So using the same logic as above, to save for S$5 rebate, that’s $500 coffee spend. At S$4 a coffee, that’s 125 days, or 25 weeks of regular coffee buying. Essentially I would ‘earn’ enough redeemable cash to have two free coffees a year.

I declined the card.
Shovel.