How Costa fits into a much bigger trend than anyone expected

For many of us, the coast is a place we use for weekend escapes, dog walks and quick pit-stops off the A-roads. Costa’s quiet takeover of those pit-stops is happening even without a clear secondary entity partner in view, because the brand increasingly lives inside other people’s spaces. That matters for readers because what’s changing on the coast is the same thing changing everywhere: how retail, hospitality and “convenience” are being rebuilt around smaller footprints, less labour and more automation.

You can still find the classic Costa café-tables, queue, barista theatre. But the bigger story is how often you now encounter Costa as a button on a screen, a machine by a till, or a drive-thru lane you barely step out of your car to use.

Costa didn’t just expand. It atomised.

There was a time when “opening a Costa” meant taking a unit on the high street and staffing it like a small restaurant. Now it can mean slotting a Costa Express machine into a petrol station, a hospital corridor, a supermarket entrance, or a seaside visitor attraction that doesn’t want the overheads of a full café.

That shift isn’t cosmetic. It changes the economics of coffee, the way space is used, and who does the work.

The growth isn’t only in more coffee shops. It’s in more coffee moments-shrunk down, standardised, and dropped into places already built for footfall.

On the coast, where trade swings hard between summer surges and winter quiet, this matters even more. Seasonal demand punishes big fixed rents and rewards formats that can run lean on a Tuesday in February.

The bigger trend: compact, semi-automated “missions”

Look past coffee and you’ll recognise the pattern from grocery, homeware and even housing design. Businesses are moving from big, single-purpose venues to compact setups that serve one job fast: grab milk, collect a parcel, charge your phone, buy a flat white, leave.

It’s the same logic driving:

• smaller retail footprints built for speed rather than browsing
  
• heavier use of self-service and app-led ordering
  
• layout choices that prioritise “throughput” (people per minute)
  
• labour shifted from visible service to remote support, replenishment and maintenance
  

Costa fits neatly into that because coffee is the perfect add-on purchase. It pairs with travel, commuting, school runs and supermarket trips-exactly the “micro-missions” that are growing.

Why the coast makes the pattern easier to see

Coastal towns sit at an awkward intersection: they host big peaks of demand, yet many have fragile year-round high streets. That tension accelerates experiments.

A full café needs steady custom to justify staffing, seating, toilets, cleaning, heating and rent. A compact format needs far less: a few square metres, reliable power, and enough passing trade.

That’s why you’ll often see Costa strongest in coastal “connector” locations:

• service stations and roadside retail on routes to beaches
  
• supermarkets where the café is a footfall magnet near the entrance
  
• tourist sites where queues spike at the same time every day
  
• transport hubs where people want caffeine without sitting down
  

In other words, the coast becomes a lab for the convenience economy: fast, predictable, and designed to cope with surges.

Coffee as infrastructure, not destination

The most revealing part is where the value sits. For a host site (a forecourt operator or supermarket), branded coffee isn’t just margin-it’s dwell time, loyalty and basket size. If a coffee offer keeps you on-site for three extra minutes, you’re more likely to buy something else.

For Costa, these embedded points of sale do something equally powerful: they turn the brand into infrastructure. You stop choosing a café. You start bumping into Costa in the background of errands.

This is the same mental shift happening in other sectors: the product becomes a layer inside an existing journey.

In the new model, the “shop” isn’t the destination. It’s a feature of somewhere you were going anyway.

The quiet operational revolution behind the counter

A traditional café is labour-heavy and messy in the most human way: training, turnover, peak-time stress, customer service, wastage and constant cleaning. A machine-led or simplified format changes the labour mix.

You can see the operational priorities clearly:

• Standardisation: fewer decisions for staff and customers, more consistency across locations.
  
• Automation: self-serve ordering, contactless by default, fewer manual steps per drink.
  
• Remote monitoring: stock levels, fault alerts and maintenance schedules handled centrally.
  
• Energy management: equipment that can be timed, throttled, or powered down outside peaks.

This doesn’t remove human work-it rearranges it. The work shifts towards replenishment runs, machine servicing, hygiene routines and troubleshooting, often spread across more sites.

The “standby power” lesson applies here too

It’s easy to fixate on the visible symbol of change-the coffee machine replacing the barista-much like blaming phone chargers for a high electricity bill. The bigger costs are usually structural: property, heating, staffing coverage, and peak-time inefficiency.

Costa’s newer formats are attractive because they target those structural costs directly: less space, fewer hours that need full coverage, and less variability in output.

A space trend hiding in plain sight: multi-use everywhere

The coast also exposes a parallel trend: spaces are being redesigned to do more than one job, more often. Just as spare rooms are being replaced by flexible, modular living spaces, retail space is being pushed to justify itself every day of the week.

A supermarket entrance that becomes “groceries + coffee + bakery + parcel locker” is the commercial version of the living room that becomes “sofa + office + guest bed”.

Both follow the same rule:

If a space doesn’t work hard every week, someone will redesign it until it does.

Costa is winning share in that world because it has formats that can be bolted onto other formats. That’s less romantic than a beloved independent café, but it is brutally compatible with how modern property and footfall work.

What gets better-and what gets worse

There are real upsides for consumers. Coffee becomes more available, queues can move faster, opening hours widen, and pricing can be kept competitive when overheads fall.

But there are trade-offs, and they show up sharply in small towns.

The wins

• Faster service in peak tourist periods
  
• Coffee access in places that can’t sustain a full café year-round
  
• More predictable quality across locations
  
• Potentially lower operating costs per cup (space and labour)
  

The risks

• Further pressure on independent cafés competing against “embedded” branded coffee
  
• Fewer entry-level hospitality roles, or more fragmented part-time work
  
• More surveillance and data capture through apps, loyalty schemes and cashless defaults
  
• A blander town centre offer if everything converges on the same few brands
  

Three Costa formats, one direction of travel

Format	What it optimises for	What it sacrifices
High-street café	Seating, social time, “third place”	High fixed costs, labour intensity
Drive-thru	Speed, repeat commuters, car journeys	Walk-in experience, town-centre presence
Express / embedded points	Footfall piggybacking, tiny footprint	Human service, lingering

The direction of travel is clear: more transactions that happen alongside something else, not as a dedicated trip.

What this means for coastal high streets in the next few years

If you’re watching coastal towns-whether as a resident, a local business owner, or someone who visits every summer-the key question isn’t “Will there be more Costa sites?” It’s whether towns end up with fewer places designed for staying, and more designed for throughput.

Planners and councils will increasingly face awkward choices:

• Do you protect sit-down hospitality as part of the town’s character, even if it’s fragile in winter?
• Do you welcome flexible, low-footprint operators that fill empty units and serve seasonal demand?
• How do you keep centres inclusive if more payment and ordering becomes app-led?

Costa isn’t the only brand doing this, and it isn’t the cause of the shift. It’s simply a very visible sign that the convenience economy has moved from “an option” to “the default”-and the coast, with its extremes of demand, is where the change stops being theoretical.

FAQ:

• Are Costa Express-style formats actually replacing cafés? Not entirely, but they are taking a growing share of everyday coffee occasions-especially where speed, space and long opening hours matter more than seating.
• Why does this trend show up so clearly on the coast? Coastal demand is spiky and seasonal, so operators favour formats with lower fixed costs and faster service that can survive quieter months.
• Is this mainly about technology? Technology helps, but the bigger drivers are property costs, labour availability, and the commercial value of packing more “missions” into the same footprint.
• What’s the downside for consumers? You gain convenience, but risk losing variety: fewer independent places to linger, more standardised offers, and more reliance on cashless, data-driven systems.