There was an old saying, “That and a dime will buy you a cup of coffee.”
Whatever “That” was had no value, but a cup of coffee cost a dime, always a dime.
Well, not anymore. A small cup of coffee at Starbucks runs about $2.95. When you add sales tax and meals tax. It’s pushing $3.50 a cup – for a cup of coffee!
The fancy brews such as Macchiatos, Mochas, Lattes, Espresso, Cappuccino, and the like can make fast work out of five and ten-dollar bills.
My Dad was a child of the Depression. If he knew that millions of people were paying over $3 for a cup of coffee. He would shake his head in disbelief. That’s almost as bad as paying $2 for a bottle of water – which is free from the tap.
Coffee is no longer a dime a cup, but it should be, or not much more than that. We often buy a 48-ounce can of Sam’s Club Classic Roast coffee for about $11. It’s great coffee with a smooth, rich flavor, but not overpowering. That large can will make about 400 cups of coffee, a little over a quarter for a cup, but certainly not $3 worth.
Even worse are those Keurig coffee pods. A package of Dunkin’ 10-cup pods are about $8 at Kroger’s. That’s way more than a dime a cup.
There was a time not so long ago, that you could slide into a booth in a diner, order a bottomless cup of coffee and a donut for a quarter and get change, and if you were lucky there would be a jukebox machine at your booth with a hundred songs ready to be played for just a nickel. If Starbucks could do that, their coffee would be worth more than $3 a cup.