Prime drinks Sheffield: 4am queues and crazy prices - opinion piece

Megan Cooke, writing for The Star, looks at all the hype and gives her verdict on the popular drink.

Recent news surrounding the beverage has seen people travelling miles to find a store with the drink in stock - a rarity as they often sell out almost instantly.

The drink is gold dust.

But the overarching question is whether the drink is worth the high monetary cost or the early morning starts.

I recently had the opportunity to try the Lemon Lime flavour of the drink and see whether or not it lived up to the media maelstrom surrounding it.

While it wasn’t necessarily bad, the viral drink was overly sweet and left me feeling a bit like I had drunk some lemon and lime squash without enough water to dilute it. The taste uncomfortably clung in my mouth and throat afterwards.

The drink boasts that it is 10 pe cent coconut water, though you can’t tell when tasting it, contains only 20 calories per bottle and has vitamins and minerals such as B12, Zinc and Magnesium.

I would, personally, not pay more than £2 for the high-demand hydration drink and I think you could more easily buy a litre of cloudy lemonade for £1 and get the same amount of enjoyment, if not more. Saying that, I can’t speak for the other flavours which may be more unique compared to the bog standard sweetened lemonade that I tried.

Despite this, some people are so desperate to taste Prime that they have been willing to spend upwards of £50 per bottle. The infamous ‘Wakey Wines’ in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, has even been selling the newly released Prime Energy for £100 a can.

Prime was created by KSI and Logan Paul, two YouTubers with almost 50 million subscribers on their main channels combined.

Their fans are often young and desperate to try the latest hot commodity promoted by the pair but some adults, who should know better, are partaking in the trend.

One woman recently spent £1,200 on a dozen cans of the energy drink from the Wakefield store. An outlandish amount of money that would pay my rent and bills for an entire month.

Given the ongoing cost of living crisis, rising energy costs and food bills, the idea that anyone would be foolish enough to spend that kind of money on something so trivial astounds me.

The high resale prices of Prime have even caught the attention of the creators themselves, with KSI condemning resellers and begging fans not to support them.

In a TikTok response video to ‘Wakey Wines’ making the high value sale, he said: “He can’t keep getting away with this! Stop buying it at these prices!”

Ultimately, while Prime isn’t bad, it is absolutely not worth the prices that some people are paying. If you happen to stumble across a bottle in your local Aldi or Asda then by all means spend the £2 and taste it if you are eager to know what it’s like, but don’t throw away your money.