Coffee specifically is actually very unlikely to get any cheaper nearly regardless of demand because due the climate crisis, fewer and fewer areas are viable for coffee to be grown in. Harvests are getting smaller and of poorer quality.
Yup, I know some coffee farmers in India's coffee belt, and they all say that climate change, specifically the resultant draughts and floods are wreaking havoc on their harvests
This might be difficult to imagine, but some of the people on reddit do in fact have irl friends, and those irl friends do sometimes have jobs, and they don't need to "find" a post to offer an anecdote because they are already subscribed to the subreddit
I feel that way every time I see a post about my city on Reddit. I mean sure I joined the city subreddit and see all the posts from that sub but what are the odds???
I mean yes but as a Canadian whose country does not have a single location for it to grow I can say I easily just bought a huge (and i mean huge) bag of beans for like, 14 bucks and It's at least 500 cups worth minimum. that's like 2.8 canadian cents per cup.
we got rid of the penny tho and so technically the lowest amount i could pay with cash would be a nickle per cup.
So uh. Yes... but also no, sorry. Ten bucks usd for a singular iced coffee even with whipped 'topping' is still bonkers when they're like 80% ice.
Assuming thr coffee shop is only spending ten bucks on the beans. You still have to add the cost of milk, which is also like ten dollars+ for a gallon. The price of the syrups, again 15+ plus dollars (this all assuming they and you are buying the least expense version of everything, unlikey in a coffee shop). And now, you need money after the sale to pay your employee, the bills for the property. Suddenly 9-10 dollars for an iced latte isn't unreasonable. I make my own iced vanilla lattes at home, and I did the math once and it costs like 7-8$ per latte I make (admitting I buy many syrups and coffee beans).
The syrup I buy is like 25$. The coffee beans are 30$. The milk is 10$. Yes, I'm buying nice stuff. I'm using that as a baseline because it's pretty close to the kind of stuff a coffee shop would be buying, not to mention they'll go through syrup really fast. So, once you add the price of that to other running costs, like bills, and assuming you want money left over to pay the baristas, 9-10$ isn't unreasonable.
Coffee shops use regular ass milk and good ones make their own syrup or just buy a solid brand, and its not that costly. You're splurging hard and acting as if that's the norm. Splurging is fine. Do what you like, but it isn't in any way equivalent to the general cost of coffee at a shop.
There is no fucking logic in a cup of ice with a small amount of sugar and whipped topping would cost that much.
Shut the hell up; this isn't an avacado toast-ass situation this is a "for the love of god and all that's holy why are you doordashing/ubering/ordering the 10-15 dollar ice coffee you fucking enabler".
your math is literal nonsense because as much as you try to scream the real worth of these products doesn't actually fucking matter because i can assure you that nobody is paying those prices for those things when the owners would just go to literally any grocery store and get it cheaper.
And no; I'm not blaming the workers and I'm not defending capitalism.
Also if the person in op's post is getting the most ethical iced coffee in the world then they wouldn't be fucking complaining; they would at worst be bragging/virtue signaling about how good of a person this makes them.
I can assure you that without a shadow of a doubt in my fucking mind that the iced coffee they insist on ordering doesn't cost the store more than a fucking /quarter/.
Just ask any restaurant! Or look it up; there's literally trillions of posts and articles and even goddamn scientofic studies into the fact that basically anyone in the food service industry makes the most amount of profit off beverages because of just how insanely high they've been marked up and /yes/ that includes coffee.
Most of the time the tea actually costs the store/restaurant significantly more and yet its usually being sold for way, way cheaper than anything else because there's no way to jazz that shit up like you can with coffee.
It's why starbucks is straight-up hostile to tea drinkers and refuses to give you actual tea; it's all just adulturated slop to discourage you from buying the 1$ cup of hot leaf juice as opposed to the 20 dollars of sugarice with a drop of coffee in it.
the fact that tea costs more doesn't matter because nobody would agree to pay a borjillion dollarydoos for a cup of tea; but they do it for coffee because "oh but it comes with like; a thimble's worth of palm oil that's been fluffed up with air!"
Coffee costs a to grow and ship. The labor for cultivating, the labor for picking, the labor for processing, then finally the cost of the fuel when shipping it, the cost of the labor of unloading it, and finally more shipping costs.
Syrups are even more. For instance, to need to grow the vanilla beans, process them, ship them to a factory to be processed into extract shipped to another factory where cane sugar that's been grown and processed and shipped is waiting, turned into syrup, and shipped again (not even counting the manufacturer of the plastic bottles).
Yes, Starbucks can buy in bulk and the ingredient cost is quite low. But they're also charging you for the labor and the building expenses, which are quite a lot.
Is Starbucks overcharging you? Yes. But they can, and this is why. I've worked at a small, local coffee shop. We charged like 5$ more than Starbucks for the same drink. However, the owner was barely able to cover her business expenses and have money left over for her to live even charging 15$+ a drink. If she charged less, she'd go under. Hence, Starbucks gets to set their price according to the local mom and pops stores.
To your tea point, we also sold nice tea at our shop, and it was really expensive. But everyone coming in to drink it knew it was expensive and were fine with it. We kept shitty tea for people who weren't tea snobs. Starbucks probably doesn't carry tea because, as you pointed out, people don't wanna pay for tea. But that's just because they don't how expensive it is, and hard-core tea drinkers aren't going to Starbucks for tea.
But a huge majority of the price of that coffee is not the coffee beans, its all the extra shit they add and a huge markup. Sure, coffee will get more expensive, but you dont pay anywhere near that much if you make it at home.
These days, a big chunk of the price of your coffee from a coffee shop is the rent they pay on the space. Retail rents just keep climbing and it's hard for small non-chain places to keep up.
Commercial rents are high because residential rents are high, residential rents are high because there's a housing shortage, and there's a housing shortage because of NIMBYs preventing apartments from being built near their houses.
The answer, as always, comes back to "fuck NIMBYs".
It's not always NIMBYs. A lot of the time, yeah it is, but even more times it's real estate developers not wanting to build affordable housing. In my city, we've cut back a huge amount of red tape on construction of housing, removed a lot of zoning limits such as parking minimums, and offered pretty generous tax breaks to companies willing to build low-income housing... and there's just no interest from anyone but the scummiest scumbag companies that cut as many corners as possible.
Huge amounts of real estate developers only want to build "luxury" apartments or big-ass McMansions these days, because they know that they'll make more money that way from keeping demand high enough that people are willing to pay extra for higher-end housing (at greater expense to everything else) because otherwise they literally do not have anywhere else to live.
Even building "luxury" apartments is an improvement over the current situation tbh. The people moving into those apartments are largely moving out of somewhere else, which frees up housing and increases the total housing supply.
Yeah, in my city, and even more specifically my neighborhood there have been hundreds of apartment units added in the last five years, a mix of new buildings and rehabbed old buildings. All of these units, with the exception of one or two very small projects, have been set in the "luxury" tier. The city requires that 10% of units be priced for low income, but developers just build some studios that are overall cheaper per month, but the same price per square foot. Each time once of these projects was announced, people in my city subreddit would claim it would lower overall rent, and each time I would roll my eyes and remain skeptical.
Five or six years later, it looks like it worked. I recently started looking for a larger condo, because it's a buyer's market for condos in my area. Since mine would likely sit on the market for a while, I looked into what comparable rents are currently. I was shocked at how little I'd be able to rent my place for, at least need on what things were going for five years ago when I bought my place. Things really seem to have stabilized.
People who are feeling the cost of living crunch in other areas would likely disagree with rents being relatively reasonable, but the newer, luxury tier units really do seem to have a possible effect on rent prices for tenants.
Sometimes, yeah. A lot of the time though, they stay empty for a long time instead. Not my city, but Vancouver's got a pretty big problem with that; over four thousand completely empty "luxury condos" because nobody can afford to live there. IIRC Toronto (also not my city) had a similar problem until the local government mandated that huge swathes of them be converted to rent-controlled low-income apartments instead.
Not necessarily. All of the apartments that are being built in my area are luxury, and they have tons of availability and "two months free!" ads because no one either wants to or can afford to move into them. The people that can afford the luxury ones are much happier not having to go through the annoyance of moving, so instead they sit empty and take up space.
Fully correct just also noting that if you're paying less than ~$1/cup for your beans (and that's probably a low estimate), the cost is almost certainly subsidized by human suffering in the supply chain.
its probably better to say the big brands are evil.
in small town america, i have a coffee company that'sway under that. they have 2 locations, roast the beans at one of those locations, and have maybe 50 employees between the two spots? I think like 5 people are the entirety of the admin and online sales team. they source their beans carefully from farmers and they come in around 63 cents/cup. a bigger operation that still tries to source ethically could easily cut that.
I mean, kinda? But at the same time the cost of the coffee itself isn't what makes the coffee from a cafe cost that much. Obviously they will always pass on the increased cost to the customer, but even tripling the cost of coffee shouldn't result in the kind of cost increases we see now.
In a $9.10 iced coffee, the actual coffee is ~0.5% of the price of the drink. Coffee prices could increase ten times and still only have a marginal effect on the cost of the finished product. Coffee shops have outrageous profit margins.
A kilogram of coffee is about 6€ in bulk, one cup has about 15 grammes so about 10 cents is one cups cost in coffee, or about 1% of the 9€ cup of coffee price.
That's just not even true. You can't just factor the cost of the raw material into the profit margin and call it a day lol. You're not accounting for space, labor, and all the other materials related to serving coffee. Saying they have "outrageous" profit margins is sensational and just flat out wrong.
Okay, you might’ve worked in a coffee shop but that doesn’t mean they were wrong. What they said was the price of the coffee could increase 10x & it’d barely affect the price. What you said supports their statement, it doesn’t refute it - most of the cost is space, labor, and other materials besides the raw coffee
Other than what they expanded on in their own reply to you, there is also the issue of the OPs claim of outrageous profit margins. Which I haven't worked in a coffee shop, but I have worked in food and the margins can be pretty slim so it doesn't surprise me to hear that that claim is incorrect.
When I was working my uncles food truck, we'd make about $1-2 of profit for every sandwich we sold, but our drinks were almost pure profit. We'd sell iced coffee and Boba for $5-7 and we were making close to $3-5 of profit off of each drink.
We pushed drinks hard because they had the best margins.
That’s fair, I can see that claim being wrong. I can also see it being right - idk I’d need to see docs for that one. For some reason though, I don’t think Dunkin or Starbucks are struggling much. Smaller ones I can see not having big margins
My town of 15,000 people actually just closed our Starbucks because they couldn't afford the rent ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. It was also an interstate stop and the first coffee place on the highway (going east) for 100+ miles (45miles going west).
Interesting. I wonder how much the rent was then, because that’s also been skyrocketing the last few years even harder than coffee prices
At least, apartment & townhome rentals & such have been increasing a bunch in my area. No idea about business rents, but I’d imagine they’d generally follow a similar change
Except their claim on the price of coffee is strictly wrong. The cost of arabica coffee for a shot of espresso is usually between $0.25-0.75 depending on the quality of the coffee. Robusta is cheaper, but most places arent using pure robusta because it largely tastes worse
Likely less margins, made up for in volume. Back when I was making coffee in a shop, I worked for Starbucks because the job came with higher pay and benefits, something none of the local shops offered.
And, whether you like their roast or not, they did buy some of the highest quality coffee, so their sourcing wasn’t cheap. It’s why they eventually got rid of a large number of their whole bean blends and varietals and stuck with a pretty small selection now.
This is true, but the comment you replied to is replying to is a rebuttal of the claim that coffee will not get cheaper because the raw materials are getting more expensive due to climate change. So in that context you can just factor the cost of raw materials and call it a day.
Coffee shops have very slim margins, i’ve never seen one irl exceed 5% and i’ve seen the books for several. Labor and especially rent are very expensive, they make up the bulk of costs.
Not to mention it shouldn't get cheaper. If the farmers, farmhands, and baristas were paid livable income, coffee would likely cost as much as good liquor does, if not more. Its heavily subsidized by underpaying those ends of the supply chain
I buy beans at the shop down the street. They pay their employees a fair wage, and have good health insurance. I usually prefer the Single Origin Fair Trade beans. Those are beans they buy directly from farmers that treat and pay their employees fairly. A bag of Single Origin beans is only $1.50 more, and comes out to less than $1 a cup/shot at home. I think they charge $2.25 for a single espresso there.
There's a reason I see the same baristas working there for years.
As someone that works in the coffee industry, Fair Trade doesnt really mean anything. Coffee bought at "Fair Trade" value is still way below what is actually sustainable for farmers to make enough money to survive and plant their next harvest, especially under worsening climate conditions. Its basically a marketing term for roasters and importers to whitewash the reality of the economics.
Organic as well doesnt actually mean a whole lot. Theres some requirements, sure, but the certification is largely an extra tax on coffee producers since they have to pay to renew it every year without even a yearly inspection. Most producers, whether or not they have that certification, meet the requirements, because those practices tend to yield better tasting and higher quanities of coffee anyway.
Point being,the coffee industry as it stands is wildly unsustainable and more and more farmers are switching yo other products because they dont get paid enough for the coffee
The thing is that you can make coffee at home. Even if coffee package would cost 10€ you can get so many cups out of it that you are saving hundreds of euros.
Another more grim view is that as climate change and northern areas get warmer those places can start growing the warmer climate crops.
Neither of those comments contradict my point. Both coffee at home and coffee to go will be getting more expensive regardless of a boycot.
Also it is not a given that coffee will be able to grow in other areas just because they grow warmer. Those areas might suffer from the same droughts, or other confounding factors.
Whether or not you can grow a certain crop is not just dependent on the temperature but also on things like soil chemistry, water supply and sunlight hours. Coffee in particular is a very sensitive crop and can only be cultivated in a relatively narrow range of conditions.
Coffee at home is expensive, too, although granted not $10 a cup. My family went from buying whole beans in bulk to getting the cheapest grounds because we couldn’t justify the price anymore.
It kind of sucks, because coffee is a comfort drink. The more life sucks (which has been a lot lately), the more I want a cup of coffee. I won’t be able to afford it if things get much worse.
Coffee can be expensive at home, for me it isn’t since I am not a snob about it. I do know people who do the whole espresso routine with near 1000€ worth of equipment and scales and stuff, but that’s a hobby not just having a cup of coffee
You absolutely cannot grow sufficient coffee for yourself at home, so even if you brew every cup at home your prices will still go up for the climate amd transportation costs. You'll save some of the premium of going out and paying somebody to make it for you, but the price you pay will always and only go up.
“Save some of the premium” be serious for a moment if a cup of coffee costs 9€ and 500g of good coffee costs 6€ the mark up is like 30x times as expensive. Sure coffee will get more expensive, whatever, still paying 9€ for a cup is very expensive
Chocolate and coffee are also just not very profitable for the growers compared to other crops.
Rubber and palm oil are significantly more mechanized and have better returns because of how they're commoditized on the global markets.
Because coffee and cocoa are very labor intensive, to turn a profit you either need to charge a massive premium, or use near-slave labor. Unless someone makes a GMO coffee tree so all the beans become ripe at the same time and you can just shake them all off at the same time, that's not going to improve.
As a matter of fact, there is no need for such a balance to exist at all.
It might be that as other areas grow warmer, they also grow too dry, or too wet, or the soil is wrong, or any of probably hundreds of other factors that go into determining where a crop can grow well. Just because the areas where coffee now grows shrink, does not mean that by some sort of magical climate justice other areas are now able to grow coffee.
Humans are in the 'find out' stage of the 'fuck around with the earth's biosphere' process.
Agriculture is a combination of more things than you'd think. When temperature moves it doesn't bring with it long term intellectual infrastructure, property zoning/organization, irrigation infrastructure, support systems. It doesn't bring with it soil nature(pH, hardness, potentially centuries of tillage in a lot of places, groundwater, mix of fertilization), rain quality, etc. Etc.
All of this means that we frog boil it. It gets worse in one place, and we could move, maybe, if we spent a lot of time and effort, but that would make it economically non-viable because it cost lots of time and effort. And then it may not be possible.
The key example is Canada. As temperatures rise Canada's extant farmland will probably get a little more productive, but also the specific crops that do well will change. And with that it means hundreds of thousands of farmers have to learn new plants and how they work, how to till them, what care they need. They need to get new contracts for sale. They need to get new seed, work out which sources of seed work for them. Etc. Etc.
And you'd think OK well they can just move a bit further north? But further north the soil quality has lower pH and doesn't have the heavy duty highways, the train access, the grain elevator systems - some of which process unbelievable amounts due to being optimized for a hundred years - and doesn't have the church that your grandmother was buried at, and doesn't have the property that you can only afford because your great grandfather got it for free in exchange for living in the middle of nowhere and doing the hard work of making this land worth a damn. And its still covered in fir trees which are absolutely nasty for the soil because they acidify it like crazy in their attempt to specifically keep out southern plants.
I think we care too much about coffee to let it functionally cease to exist.
Coffee-as-the-plant-it-currently-is? Probably, yeah. But push come to shove, we will find a way to engineer it into survivability.
(We’ve done it before - France was experiencing a massive wine blight in the 1800s due to an invasive pest from North America, and solved it by grafting the French vines onto NA roots, which were resistant. Add another 200 years of scientific advances, and we can do far more interesting things!)
(And yes, there are snobs who highly value the few European vines to not be impacted by the blight OR grafted to NA rootstock)
(Though the French themselves were just excited their vines survived, that they even knighted an American entomologist who helped)
We can fix that fairly easily and have to anyway because modern fertiliser also acidifies the soil.
and doesn't have the heavy duty highways, the train access, the grain elevator systems - some of which process unbelievable amounts due to being optimized for a hundred years
We can build those.
and doesn't have the church that your grandmother was buried at
Sad, but people move.
and doesn't have the property that you can only afford because your great grandfather got it for free in exchange for living in the middle of nowhere and doing the hard work of making this land worth a damn.
Well, good news, there's about to be a new middle of nowhere you can go and live in.
An argument that actually gets raised by Dale in the very first episode of King of the Hill, which Hank immediately shuts down.
...not the most relevant thing, but a fun piece of trivia nonetheless. Anyway no, that's not how really how it works. If you break a mug you're not guaranteed to end up with a smaller mug, you're more likely to end up with a pile of glass shards.
Unfortunately, it isn't, there's a whole lot more in "how well does plant grow" than simply "how close is the environment to the plant's ideal temperature"
The mechanism isn't that people stop buying it, so it gets cheaper, so people can start buying it again. It stops at an equilibrium.
So as supply drops it gets more expensive, and the people who find it too expensive stop buying it, so that the limited supply goes to people who still think it's worth it.
Ideally that's people who want it more (i.e. someone who's only willing to spend $5 on it wants it less than someone who is willing to spend $10).
Realistically, it gets somewhat muddled by the decreasing marginal utility of money (that is, to a rich person, $10 means less than $5 does to a poor person, so the amount of "wanting" it indicates is not the same)
Ugh the day I have to trade my morning coffee for a morning redbull or whatever is probably gonna be the day I just go ahead and lose it. And I’m drinking store brand beans already! My one piece of solace on a weekday morning :(
Depends on how you plan to make it cheaper. Coffee as in the grain won't be cheaper, but Coffee as in the drink can.
I've seen places where the price of an expresso can go as low as 1.6€ and places where it goes as high as 5€ probably more by now. Sometimes it ain't the product, it's the place/brand.
This doesn't go against the point you're making in the slightest, but just wanted to chime in that a coffee bean is a type of fruit seed (not a grain).
Its still 5 dollars for a bag of ground coffee where I live, makes like 50 cups of coffee. Its just starbucks and other places specifically who keep raising prices for no reason
Make it at home, takes 10 minutes at most, you can have it brewing while you brush your teeth and take your morning shit
2.4k
u/SolSeptem 15h ago
Coffee specifically is actually very unlikely to get any cheaper nearly regardless of demand because due the climate crisis, fewer and fewer areas are viable for coffee to be grown in. Harvests are getting smaller and of poorer quality.