I hate Cosi

I'm sorry to say, this is a bit of a rant... there's just no way around it today.

Have you ever been to a restaurant named Cosi? It's much like Panera Bread, Au Bon Pain, or any other mostly-sandwich-soup-salad-sometimes-breakfast-and-croissants kinda place. It looks like it's a chain mostly in the eastern half of the country.

My first time at Cosi, I went with a coworker during lunch. It was decent, and actually even enjoyable. Their specialty is the flat bread they use to make their sandwiches. The only thing I didn't like about the place was their prices... $7.50 for one frickin' sandwich!

So, I enjoyed it the first time. And I usually don't get that excited about sandwiches or lunch places; I'm much more of a breakfast and dinner person. But my boyfriend loves lunch, and we happened to have a Cosi right next to our apartment also, so I took him.

This place was not crowded like the first one I'd been to. And when I asked for my sandwich, the woman looked confused. She'd never heard of that sandwich... what? She asked me how to make it. It turned out slightly wrong, we didn't get our free side of carrots, most of the registers were closed and we had no idea where to pay, etc. This kind of service doesn't make you feel good about the almost $10 you spent.

We'd sworn off Cosi; the hell with it! Then last week my boss gave me a Cosi gift card that came in the mail. Fine, I'm a sucker for free things. I activated the card online and it was for $10. Great, I thought, that will buy me one whole lunch. Since the first restaurant I went to wasn't that bad, I figured I'd just go back. It was a free lunch, after all.

After waiting in line for almost 10 minutes, which actually feels like quite a while and eats up most of your already too short lunch break, they ordered me the wrong sandwich. When I finally got it and went to pay at the register, the gift card conveniently wasn't working. "Will it work at any other register?" I asked. "No, do you have any other form of payment?"

The whole reason I went was because it would be free! I'm very disciplined about bringing my lunch to work, not going out every single day and flushing away my money, and now I'm stuck paying for an overpriced sandwich that I didn't even want. And I didn't get the damn carrots again!

A more awesome, more assertive person would have just said, "stuff your sandwich, I'm outta here!" But I paid for it, like a jackass. But you better believe I'm not going back this time... not even if I get FIVE gift cards! What a perfect scam for them, mail out some crappy bogus gift cards, get people to put their address online to register it so that they inadvertently sign up for all kinds of junk mail and spam, and then when they come into the store thinking it will all be free, give them a nice punch in the face that they never saw coming!

Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice...

Here are some links to others who hate Cosi... unite!

Cosi vs. Panera
"I went to Cosi for the first time today because I'd hoped it'd be a suitable Panera replacement. It wasn't."

"I hate Cosi! Everytime I get a sandwich there I think WTF did I do!!
$7.00 for a piece of thin ass bread, Mozzarella, tomato, basil, and vinagerette. Oh, and a bag of salty chips....."

The original what's for lunch
"I totally agree about Cosi... sucky for lunch. And the people in the one near my office are so rude - like they're doing you a favour. Argh. Haaaaaate. Speaking of channeling hate. Last time I almost had my card for a free salad filled up I was determined to get the free salad & then never go back. Then, on my free salad day, I got into a minor altercation with the sandwich lady (beyotch wouldn't make me a salad - they can't seem to decide if there's a separate line for salads, or just one line for both) & then the manager came over & said my salad was free! So I had to go back *again*!! Curses!"

"cosi sucks ass. salads are so expensive and they all taste kinda the same...like mcdonald's has something in their food that makes everything from the fries to the quarter pounder have this common taste in it...freaks me out, man."

LizLawson.blogspot.com
"I hate Cosi. I go there nearly every single day for lunch and it's starting to really bug me. It's disgusting. Agh!"

Yelp.com
"I hate Cosi for single-handedly raising the price of a DC lunch by $2-3."