This is why I got a cheap Aeropress and milk frother. I pay enough for my latte, and the barista makes as much as I do, stop judging me for not tipping. I tip servers, not counter workers.
- me with six accelerometers glued to my monitor -
“How do you get it to register as diagonal?”
I know that’s the only way to change how the system works, but at the same time my conscience yells at me and tells me that if I don’t tip them, they might not be able to buy a necessity because they don’t make as much as counter staff.
I feel like it’s a catch 22
I don’t mind tipping for any hospitality service, but what I really hate about fast food and cafe tipping is that they often collect payment and push for a tip before the order was made incorrectly.
That’s a good point. I also hate that about food delivery services. I tip my drivers well, but I don’t like that I’m often giving a good tip and not getting good service in return. If I’d have known I was going to get bad service, I would have tipped based on distance only and it would be significantly less.
Sometimes it’s just a no win scenario, even with a refund it’s still a bunch of hoops to jump through just to be hungry and annoyed, but at no cost to you!
If you don’t get good service on GrubHub or wherever, you just complain to their helpline. They give you refunds.
Honestly I have no issues with 95% of delivery orders. And usually the issue is the restaurant’s fault.
I’ve had my aeropress for years and have a love/hate relationship with it. I go on streaks that make incredible cups, followed by the worst cups of my life when I inevitably forget the ratios or change grinds. I really do like it and wish I could be a snob but I just settle for my Nespresso (when it isn’t broken and needing warranty replacement, again).
I could but then I wouldn’t be able to justify my irrational need for a new coffee machine.
To be fair though, I’ve written it down and tried that. Maybe it’s my perception that changes or the little unaccounted nuances add up to big differences. Right now, I have a bold Cuban batch from Key West that tastes like burnt plastic no matter the amount of water or brew time.
They make apps for that now: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.omelan.cofi/
They’ll keep it up as long as business is good. If people will pay 12$ for a latte and lines are out the door, and there are no regulations to stop price gouging and predatory behavior, why wouldn’t they?
Oh there are definitely laws to stop price gauging but that’s for small businesses and individuals who aren’t rich.
why wouldn’t they?
It’s not even a matter of “why wouldn’t they,” do much as a matter of they must.
Absent of regulations, any company that doesn’t abandon every conceivable human moral in pursuit of more profit will find itself hopelessly out-competed by the ones that do. If your every competitor is charging $12 for a latte and paying their employees starvation wages, and you charge a reasonable amount and pay your employees a decent wage, then every hour you’re in business your competitors will be making more money than you, and you will always fall behind, unless something comes along to close that gap.
Libertarians might try to say that eventually the free market will close the gap, but adults know otherwise. The free market doesn’t give a shit about human decency, the environment, the value of mom and pop businesses, or any of that. The free market can only ever want to make more money, every year, at a faster rate of increase, every year. Forever.
Government is the only thing that can reasonably account for how things should be. Regulations are the only reason we don’t have 80 hour work weeks and children in the mines.
Is $12 for a latte even price gouging?
Like, $12 for milk and eggs? $12 for a pound of veggies or a gallon of gas or a jug of water during a hurricane? Sure.
But I can buy a bag of beans for $12 and make ten cups easy. I just don’t know if I’d call it price gouging because you’re willing to pay out the nose for foamed milk.
Lattes aren’t essential. Charging $12 for one is neither predatory nor price gouging. It’s arguably exploitatative but I don’t feel it’s our job to tell people they’re not allowed to waste their own money.
Acting on “what the market will bear” instead of what at cost as well as labour is predatory in that it is opportunistic in the basic definition of what makes predatory behaviour predatory. It is also gouging as it is setting a price range that can be considered exclusionary. And then to also attack a customer who feels this and speaks it can be considered victim blaming as you’re enabling these behaviours by dismissing the feedback of the victim, which again is being exclusionary by enforcing their money to be taken but not allowing they can be part of the feedback or setting boundaries of what is happening to them.
When you call someone choosing to buy a $12 latte a victim it makes everything else you say impossible to take seriously.
I think coffee shops should 100% be allowed to price gouge. Its a product anyone can easily make at home for pennies.
It’s like those multi million dollar art installations that’s literally just a yellow square with a red dot in the middle.
to be fair a setup that can make espresso drinks in the same quality league as coffee shops will cost in the range of 1000-3000€ but if you drink one cup per day then you can save that amount in a year by making coffee at home
If you can afford a 1-3K espresso setup you probably don’t think about saving money on coffee
Bambino is 600, if you do the math it pays itself off in like two or three months of owning one vs going to a coffee shop.
And so easy just grow your own beans on your acres of land, toil it, roast those beans and voila. Same with brewing your own beer, grow your hops…etc. or wine, grow your own grapes…
You could say that about any food really.
But if you say that oh, the frazzled parents and people who live in mere apartments without land to grow this stuff or people with two jobs and can’t pick their own farm land will come down on you so hard. So spoilt.
It is like people who continue to feed ticketmaster and the resale markets with their predatory fees and prices. Why shouldn’t they keep doing it if people will keep paying their insane prices for nonessentials?
Legit not arguing but other than going to the physical box office, what alternatives are there to Ticketmaster? I would love to know so I can stop giving them money.
Absolutely. There is no real alternative for most people but at least it isn’t a necessity. They have a nice monopoly going.
The barista is a tablet
At my local independent coffee shop the practice is that the baristas pay no attention and start working on your order as soon as you get to the tip screen so there’s no pressure to assign a gigantic tip. They also have much better beans than Starbucks, to the point that the founder of this shop spun off the coffee bean sourcing/roasting into a separate business that he continues to manage and now is the supplier of beans for every independent coffee shop for a 50 mile radius
There’s a new coffee shop in Seattle that’s literally 4 robot arms making coffee at 4 different machines. There’s one guy in the store to keep things tidy, but that’s it.
Pay screen still asked for a tip.
Baristas and coffee connoisseurs exist in a perpetual state of disapproval, so you might as well save some money.
The baristas at the cafe my daughter and I usually go to (which is so good that even though it is half an hour away and one town over, we still go) are great. And really friendly. It’s not especially cheaper than anywhere else, but they have a decent selection of non-coffee drinks like smoothies and bubble tea for my daughter, a drink called a dirty chai which I really like for me (chai with a shot of espresso), and a lot of surprisingly good gluten-free pastries and cookies. We aren’t gluten-free and gluten-free baked goods that I’ve tried generally haven’t impressed me, but these aren’t bad. They also have gelato. Plus, a chill atmosphere and a lot of comfortable places to sit.
If you’re ever going down I-70 through Illinois and pass by Marshall near the Indiana border, the Gypsy Queen Cafe is worth a stop, if for no other reason than to see a surprisingly upscale cafe for a tiny town in the middle of nowhere.
Edit: The menu on the website is incomplete. So is the menu on their sign. It’s sort of distributed throughout the store. That’s the one thing I don’t like about it, but I’m used to it now.
Sounds like a nice place! It’s cool that you have that near you. The 3rd wave places near me seem to think that coffee is the lifeblood from which all things sprout, and their attitudes generally suck. Their coffee is good though.
And the company probably made a net profit of 5 billion — a 25% rise from the previous year.
