Mildly Infuriating

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.

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.

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.

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.)

I stopped drinking coffee when it became too expensive. Problem solved. :)

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

i heard g7 viet coffee is good, but pricey.

Thanks Obama

$2.50 for that was nuts to begin with.

Used to sit and drink coffee and talk to friends for hours at the small town diner for 52¢, bottomless.

So many things are getting harder to justify buying these days. Definitely been going out less in general. :(