The trouble is that of the few remaining mom and pop places, they are typically run by folks that started working early and had limited education. They are fodder for manipulation. POS systems get in or cheap/free at times, charge for the service and “surface insights”.
“You could be charging most for X”
“this is your best seller on weekday afternoons”
And these decent folks, like many of us, can have some imposter syndrome. We don’t want to look like rubes so we press the button to test higher prices on X.
I stopped drinking coffee when it became too expensive. Problem solved. :)
Remember when everyone was buying those Keurig cups? So crazy they were like 80 cents a cup just get yourself coffee at Dunkin at that point
Yeah people seem to be OK with paying a lot for their coffee it seems… :)
I mean, I kind of understand it. When I was working, i was rewarding myself with nice coffee, just to have something nice during the day…
Now I don’t work anymore and it has led to removing a lot of stupid costs and unhealthy habits.
I’m ok paying a premium for quality coffee. I’m not paying a premium for mediocre burnt or watery shit.
Idk, it costs me 3€ to get a 250g pack of ground coffee. 5€ to get a 250g pack of sustainable zapatista coffee. I can make many cups with a single pack. And yet, the price for a single espresso is usually 3€ or more in my area.
Of course the beans are always getting more expensive, but it’s still nowhere close to that price.
You’re paying for time, that’s the most expensive part of all restaurant food. Time in employees wages, time in the building’s rent cost, and so on. The coffee beans are probably the third lowest costing part of the cup of coffee, just above the water and electricity.
Just get a knockoff plastic cup that fits in there. I refill that thing with coffee grounds 3 time a day for probably less than a dollar
Not to be that guy, but we have been under-paying for coffee for many years now. The price of beans kept going up, but customers were locked into what a cup of coffee should be and extremely price sensitive about addressing the reality.
A catch-up is underway all over the world.
Note. Not a cafe owner and I don’t have anything to do with coffee except drink it.
Costco large bag of whole lighter roast beans with a good grinder gets a pretty good price and quality.
Possibly, but the OP was talking about sitting in a cafe, not brewing at home.
At a cafe you have overheads, staff, cleaning, etc. Plus the rising cost of beans. All I’m saying is that cafes can’t freeze the price of coffee to a past point in time because customers have a fixed idea of what a brew should cost.
Coffee prices will continue to go up; most people do not realize that already today climate collapse is responsible for part of the inflation. Coffee and chocolate plantations are suffering from erratic weather and droughts. In addition, demand for coffee is continuously increasing too; but overall all crops are suffering from lower productivity, so food will get more and more expensive… even if we manage to not pass the 2.5C global heating.
Small scale growers/roasters have had 0% pressure to increase prices as their business does not rely on Brazilian hektofarms. You can get vastly better coffee at a comparative price if you care about the taste of your coffee.
We’re going to be left with robusta beans, and I’m pissed.
No. You get artificial flavours and freeze dried instant coffee.
The price of coffee in a cafe has fuck all to do with coffee prices.
Let me think about this.
Sure does. They would lose money if the cost of the beans was more expensive than the coffee sold for to the customer.
The cost of coffee in a cafe is more about staff and rent, sure, but when the raw ingredients go up, it still affects the price.
Ground coffee is about $8 a bag at the grocery. Much cheaper to make your own at home.
(Edit: I am no less infuriated than OP. Just pointing out how ridiculous this markup/gouging is.)
The point is that we should be able to maintain a certain standard of living…
Whats the point of constantly telling people to eat at home and not enjoy anything that costs money?
Why even eat food when we can just eat soylent? Why even eat when we can just live in a pod of goop and be connected to the matrix? Much cheaper to live like that!
If you’d stop buying avacado toast, you’d finally have enough money to buy an NFT of a house
You make an excellent point. It had just occurred to me because i have been having to cut back and find solutions to ridiculous price gouging like this. Between the high prices and the cost cutting quality of eating out these days, i find myself making a lot more stuff at home. I’ve also had to remove a lot of restaurants from my list of places to eat. One place charged me $30 for scrambled eggs, oatmeal, and iced tea. I haven’t been back. Comparing the price of a bag of ground at the grocery to this retail cup just points out how ridiculous it all is. It’s no less infuriating.
and i wasn’t calling your post out specifically… i see this all over the internet… people complain about the price of going out and the advice is always “just stay home and make food/coffee!”
i don’t want to just survive on the cheapest possible budget and never enjoy anything… that’s just a race to the bottom and ends with us sitting in little pods living out whatever dystopian nightmare they predicted decades ago…
No worries. I think we’re on the same page.
Because if you continue paying the high prices, then companies will just increase them again. Because the market will bear it.
The only way to stop it is to vote with your wallet. It only took like 1% of subscribers canceling to get Disney to change its stance on Kimmel.
but you’re comparing disney to a local cafe…
these guys aren’t just willy-nilly increasing the price of coffee for funsies. a lot of these issues have to do with supply chain, commercial rents, and billionaire created issues… the real solution isn’t just to stay home and let your local cafe go bankrupt… need to solve the big picture issues that are causing inflation without the wage increases that we all need.
It wasn’t subscribers. It was Disney adults cancelling their vacations. That’s how Disney actually makes money, they won’t fuck with those people.
In microeconomic theory, an agent gains utility from consumption and has a willingness to pay. If a normal product has a higher price than the willingness to pay is, he will not consume that product. He will consume another product.
I am not sure if I shall laugh but you are suggesting to ignore the willingness to pay and just pay whatever the price is because your utility from dining out is incredibly high.
You can easily substitute food at a restaurant. Food at restaurants is mostly not even good anymore. You are doing yourself a favor if you do not consume their ultra high processed food.
Also, you may have enough money to spend as much as you want for a cup of coffe but there are people, most people, who can (or should) not afford a cup for 5 bucks because buying a pack for 8 lasts all month vs 150 if consumed every day.
Craving is a very bad state for the mind. Becoming free of craving gives you more than consuming all the shiny stuff that you see all day long, everywhere.
The most expensive stuff I buy is $18 per 12oz (used to be 16oz) bag. Still makes about 20 cups of some of the best coffee money can buy.
The price of good coffee has definitely risen lately, but the price at the bottom of the market has really cranked up. Something like a can of folgers has basically doubled in the past year or so.
Coffee is going extinct, the price will only go up from here.
I say this, but i shouldn’t jinx it. I’m sure there are a lot of companies who are salivating at the idea of jacking up the price of ground coffee at the grocery to match the ridiculous expense of retail.
AFAIK drip coffee is made from ground coffee.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drip_coffeeSo I think OP is buying his at $5 for a bag of ground coffee, without specifying a size???
The difference is getting a coffee at a bar vs getting coffee at home, not switching ingredients.
OK doesn’t look like a bar tom me.
OP is not clear about that.
But yes buying out is always expensive.You’re right it’s not clear, but to me it’s a very unlikely price and a very unlikely cup for a coffee at home.
The price does not seem unlikely if it’s a pack of ground coffee.
That kind of cup is pretty normal here. Not as much as it used to be, but some people still prefer traditional coffee cups instead of mugs. And the little creamer thingy is pretty normal too if you use milk in your coffee.
Also most bars here would have bigger cups than that.
But it’s impossible to say for sure one way or the other. There is not a lot to go on in that picture.But the headline says “this coffee” and that would indicate it’s just the 1 cup of coffee.
So maybe it is a bar?
In my country, this is about 15-20 US cents per sachet, imported from Indonesia. It is cheap and processed, but once mixed in a cup, it’s available at any roadside stand to go along with a bread roll, crackers, or a cigarette.
Looked it up on Walmart and it goes for US$27 for 30 sachets. Heavy tariffs, I presume?
Heavy tariffs, I presume?
Not likely, just campitalism doing it’s thing. If people buy it at ~$1 each, they’ll sell it for that, and try to raise the price again next year.
i heard g7 viet coffee is good, but pricey.
It’s actually worse here in Denmark, prices on ground coffee have more than tripled since 3 years ago.
Back the we could get a 500g pack for a little less than $3.50 USD, now we get only 400g for $10, when on special offer you may be lucky to find it at $7. That’s 2½ times the price, even when on special offer.
So needless to say I always buy several bags when it’s on special offer. But even then it’s more than twice the price of 3 years ago.Some brands are now even reducing the packages to 350g. Which isn’t much more than a half size bag used to be.
This picture is from a couple of days ago in Finland
No, I wasn’t brave enough to buy it, I have no idea how they can sell it so cheap
I would absolutely read the table of content, but I agree that price is insane.
You’ve got coffee shrinkflation? In Germany it’s still 500 grams, but expensive, of course. I only buy the brands that are on offer.
Yes we have shrinkflation on coffee, we used to have 400g packages special roast that they claimed could be used to make as many cups of coffee as a 500g, but of course that’s bullshit, and it taste worse IMO.
Some brands still have 500g packages, and one of the most popular is 10,50 Euro!
And it’s been bought by American Keurig Dr Pepper, so I’ll never buy that again.
I really have an urge to put small American flags on that shit.
And coffee is still way too cheap.
Local coffee shop here is also a roaster and a helping hands non-profit. Even years ago the price of a cup was too much for me to spare, so I’ve always opted for their beans. The have a subscription with a slight discount and recently started selling 5-pound bags so my price per ounce is even lower than it was in the past. One of the few thing that hasn’t gone up.
There’s really no value in going to a coffee shop any more unless its to socialize, and the social element is dying by design. The coffee quality is never better than you can make at home for a tenth of the price, and most places are now redesigning their interiors so that they encourage people to move on, not hang out.
I mean look at the chair in OP’s pic - sit on that for more than 10 minutes and you’re going to have a crimp in your back. That’s an intentional design element to keep you moving and not taking up space for new customers.
You give me a coffee shop with big ass sofas and a piano and chess sets and wifi and I’ll gladly pay $5 a cup to hang out. I’ll probably end up spending another $20 while I’m there. But the coffee alone just ain’t worth it.
You give me a coffee shop with big ass sofas and a piano and chess sets and wifi and I’ll gladly pay $5 a cup to hang out. I’ll probably end up spending another $20 while I’m there. But the coffee alone just ain’t worth it.
I agree with Chandler. I heard Central Perk is cool.
Totally agree. There’s one or two privately owned coffee shops that still have tables and chairs made for sitting and doing things at.
Forget it with any of the big chains. I’m halfway expecting some anti-homeless architecture on their small ass stools next time I’m there…which won’t be ever since they priced me out.
When where coffee shops solely about the coffee?
Not defending the price of a cup of coffee at all, but as someone who roasts their own coffee (both cause I love the process and am a cheap bastard), its only fair to point out the price of green beans is almost exactly double the price it was 3 years ago.
Again, plenty of ways to slice the astronomic price, but at the end of the day I would only half blame the restaurant here on the mark up
https://www.macrotrends.net/datasets/2535/coffee-prices-historical-chart-data
Your post made me wonder proportion of the price corresponds to the beans. I’m surprised it’s so high honestly, and it may still have gone up since 2024.
Do you use robusta or arabica? My understanding is that arabica is what’s skyrocketing in price, but many coffee shops use robusta beans which are more climate change tolerant (and cheaper).
This feels more like oil companies arbitrarily jacking up prices in 23 and using Russia invading Ukraine as an excuse (despite only a small fraction of our oil coming from Russia).
The only people using robusta (at least in the US, I cant speak for other markets) is bottom tier trash like Folgers. No real coffee shop uses it.
Vietnamese-style coffee is the one exception I know of. But yeah, I feel like anyone who likes coffee enough to avoid mass-market Folger’s trash would be very surprised if they happened to sip robusta while expecting arabica.
$2.50 for that was nuts to begin with.
Thanks Obama
Whatever for? I don’t see how Obama influenced coffee pricing?
It is a joke
Ah shit fell for that one 🤓
Used to sit and drink coffee and talk to friends for hours at the small town diner for 52¢, bottomless.
I try to reduce my coffee/caffeine consumption but if I get a coffee at a diner, you’d better believe I’m slamming five or more.
So many things are getting harder to justify buying these days. Definitely been going out less in general. :(
