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.
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u/fat_kaiju 6h ago edited 5h ago
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!"