Hey Starbucks, where'd my 96 cents go?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

[At first I thought this was a General Question, but perhaps it’s one of those nebulous questions like “If my dissertation gets sucked into a black hole, where does the information go?” to which only Stephen Hawking – and, I pray, my thesis advisor – knows the answer. Then I thought it was a Pitting, but it just seems too Mundane and Pointless. So for better or worse it has landed here.]

A “tall” (i.e., small) mocha at Starbucks costs $2.74. So far as I can tell, it consists of a hot chocolate plus one espresso shot.

A “tall” hot chocolate costs $2.30. A “solo espresso” (one espresso shot) costs $1.40

So if, like today, I want both an immediate espresso shot to wake myself up and a hot chocolate to sip on at a more leisurely pace, I end up paying $3.70 (plus tax, of course). Apparently, the price of the second paper cup is 96 cents.

This raises several questions:

  1. WTF?
  2. How is it that I can understand how 1+2+3+4+… = -1/12, but the mathematics of my Starbucks bill has me stumped.
  3. If instead of paying cash, I were to barter with some sort of gemstone, such as an Opal, would they give me a better deal?
  4. Why am I still giving them my money?
  5. Seriously, WTF?
2

I can only answer #4.

You head is stuck in your nether regions. Find a 7-Eleven.

3

I will never forget the time I was trying to get a coffee at some kiosk at Paddington Station. I can’t drink milk, and they don’t do brewed coffee, so my options were limited to an espresso or an americano (i.e. an espresso in an 8 oz cup, filled up with hot water). I much prefer espresso - why bother watering it down?

They had a special on, a pastry and an americano for 2 quid, or something. I asked if I could get an espresso instead (remember, the only difference is that the cup is smaller and there’s no hot water in it) and she said “Sure!” So I ordered it all up and she charged me the full price for the pastry and the coffee. She would not give me the espresso (remember: absolute cost = lower by any measure) for the (sale) price of the Americano.

I kicked up a huge fuss at the most egregious example of “British customer service” I have ever encountered. (And there were many.) Still I lost. I went away with no coffee (she preferred to dump it down the sink than to give it to me for the reduced price of something that was more expensive …)

Part of this madness has to do with the fact that coffee itself is extremely cheap. The expense comes from paper cups (or washing/storing ceramic cups), sugar, milk, paying off the fancy espresso machine, rent, staff salary, heat and water, etc. A mocha is one drink, and requires one cup, one transaction, and no extra sugar or milk. A hot chocolate and an espresso is two drinks, requiring (in most cases, even if not your particular case) two transactions, and likely extra sugar and/or milk for the espresso, and all the additional cost that entails.

I drink my coffee black (no sugar) and carry my own mug, yet I regularly pay full price for it, knowing that most of the cost is for overhead that I don’t actually use. I’ve stopped complaining about it, it’s pointless. Ah well.

My question is: why in the world do people pay for TEA at such places? Crikey, folks, buy the teabags and buy your own hot water. Coffee is way better coming from such places. But I can make a cup of tea that’s just as good, all by myself. Total rip-off.

4

I’m the reverse. I can make a fantastic cup of coffee that’s hands-down better than the major coffee chains. I even have an expresso maker, so I can whip out mochas, lattes, whatever. But I can’t make tea to save my ass. (Unless of course, it’s sweet tea - something, cowgirl, you would probably consider to be an abomination - ETA: coming from that side of the pond, I mean). I don’t see what’s so hard about hot water, a tea bag, and a few tea leaves, but whatever I do - it usually leaves me empty inside. :frowning:

5

Wrong. The biggest cost isn’t the cost of the coffee beans, or the milk, or the sugar, or the paper cups. The biggest cost is rent, and the fact that every drink is prepared individually. You aren’t paying for coffee, you’re paying to have someone MAKE you your coffee.

And they aren’t charging you on a formula of their cost plus a 10% profit on that cost, they’re charging you an amount that they hope will bring in the maximum amount of revenue, considering all factors (competitors, costs, repeat business, demand, and so on). If their cost to make and serve an espresso was 10 cents, but people were willing to buy them for $3.00, they aren’t going to sell them for $0.15 but rather for $3.00. Of course, if the real cost to make and serve and espresso was $0.10, and they charged $3.00, other people would open competing coffee stands and undercut them.

6

Are you new? Sometimes when you buy something, it costs X dollars. You buy something else and it costs Y dollars. But if you buy X and Y together, you will often get a price that is a little less than X + Y. This is because they are making more money than they would have if they had sold you only X or only Y, and are banking on the fact that you probably wouldn’t have bought X and Y seperately anyway.

7

Of course, ‘what people are willing to buy them for’ isn’t really a cut-and-dried single price, because not all customers are the same. What you really have to work with is the idea that if they cost $5.00, a few people would buy them - if they cost $3.00, more people would buy them, if they cost $2.50, a few more, and if they cost ninety cents, a bunch of people might buy three, etcetera…
In other words, a demand curve. :slight_smile:

8

Heh. I usually go to one particular tarbucks, because they are very sweet, friendly (and a couple are friggin gorgeous) there. I sometimes hit another store where they are idiot hicks who hardly know their asses from coffee cups. I used to drink a triple tall mocha, non-fat, no-whipped until I realised that I could get the same thing minus the milk (I abhor milk) by ordering a triple tall Americano with mocha syrup -- and it was cheaper. One of my hottie barristas pointed out that it was even cheaper ( .25) to order a grande Americano in a tall cup, though, so my order is nice and complicated and always gets me into an argument with new people who don’t pay attention.
Grande Iced Americano in a tall cup with 3 pumps of mocha syrup = $2.73
Triple Tall Iced Americano with 3 pumps of mochas syrup = $3.00
Meh – I just tell them slowly when it’s a new person and correct them gently when they (as is inevitable) fuck it up. When they argue, I put them in their place and remind them that I am the customer, this is what I order and this is how to make it. Most new people don’t last long if they fuck up my drink more than once…

9

tim314, have you ever tried ordering a tall mocha with the espresso in a seperate cup? Any decent starbucks should do that for you. My mom orders tall iced lattes with the ice in a seperate cup. So then she get almost double the regular iced latte. That’s why you pay $3 for $0.10 worth of coffee, the service!

10

Next time, don’t ask for an espresso, just ask them to hold the hot water on the Americano. :smiley:

11

I tried! I tried EVERYTHING!! EVERYTHING!! AHHHHH!!

::tears hair out, beats chest::

.

.

.
::breathes::

It’s clear the scars from this have still not healed. I shouldn’t have brought it up.

12

I make an okay tea by my standards, but when I want something other than water or alcohol I order hot tea at a sit-down restaurant, even though I always feel like I’m being ripped off (with one exception, see, below.) But I usually order water since I don’t feel like paying 2 bucks for carbonic acid and sugar.

The time I don’t feel like I’m getting ripped off is when I get a “tea flight”, or a variety of different teas to choose from. Preferably accompanied by a holder of hot water enough for 2 drinks so I don’t have to ask for more hot water all the time. That way I can sample several different types of teas without buying all the packages, and have some variety in my repast to boot.

13

Sometimes this works backwards, though. I was once at a Sbarro, where they’d sell you a plate of spaghetti for $2.99.* You could buy meatballs a la carte for $1 each.They had a special – spaghetti with 2 meatballs for $5.75. I got into an argument with the cashier about how much I should be charged. She insisted that I should be charged the amount for the special. I finally convinced her to charge me the lesser amount when I moved the meatballs to the other side of my plate.

*Numbers made up. This was a while ago.

14

This kind of reminds me of My McGriddle Adventure. So, according to the menu, the McDonald’s McGriddle (the breakfast sandwich with pancake-like bread) only comes with either bacon or sausage. But I had a dream, nay, a vision, that a McGriddle would be ultimately delicious with Candian Bacon instead. Since McDonald’s puts Canadian bacon on the Egg McMuffin, I figured this would be no problem.

Over a fairly long period of time (McGriddles are a ~3x yearly treat for me) I attempted to purchase “A Mcgriddle, but with Canadian bacon instead of bacon.” Blank looks abounded. “It doesn’t come that way,” the counter people would tell me. “Just with bacon or sausage.” ARRGH! How hard can it be to slap a hammy disc on an egg? Thinking pricing was the problem, I tried reasoning with them. “I Don’t care what you charge me,” I would tell them “charge me anything you want. Charge me for a Big Mac. Just give me a Mcgriddle with Canadian bacon.” They were not swayed by my pleas.

I tried to make my dream a reality in three different states. All my efforts were in vain.

Until the day I visited the McDonald’s in the tiny hamlet of Orange, VA. As I approached the counter, I still felt the dream was alive. “Can I have a McGriddle, but with Canadian bacon,” I asked her.

“well… it doesn’t come that way,” she began. My heart sank in an all-too-familiar manner. Luckily, this 16 year old lass from the Virginia backcountry was smarter than the average bear. She truly wanted to give me, the customer, what I desired from my McDonald’s breakfast experience. Frowning, she continued “Let me get this straight, you want egg, cheese, and Canadian bacon, with the Mcgriddle bread?”

Yes, yes, oh god yes, I thought. My heart in my throat, I replied, “Yup.”

She pressed some buttons, and hollered to the cooks, “Give me an Egg McMuffin on McGriddle bread.” My heart soared. The sandwich was delivered. It was just as delicious as I dreamed it would be.

Since then, I have ordered “Egg McMuffin, on McGriddle bread” at McDonald’s far and wide. Every single employee has not only comprehended what I want, but delivered it correctly. Conclusion:
McGriddle with Canadian Bacon: impossible dream
Egg McMuffin on McGriddle bread: yumilicious reality

15

See? You just have to learn to speak McEnglish.

16

Thanks for the replies, everyone. Of course the real answer is that they’re going to charge whatever they think they can get me to pay, and if I’m dumb enough to set foot in a place that sells a cup of coffee for $3 then they figure that’s probably a lot.

Still, sometimes I think it would be nice if the world worked on the logic of “2 + 2 = 4”, instead of “2 + 2 = 5 for very gullible values of 2.”