It’s because drinking overpriced coffee, sitting outside on a rattan chair in the middle of the day while noodling away on a macbook or reading a pretentious book about the tao of fungus is FASHIONABLE.
Have you noticed how other fashion items are also insanely expensive and over priced? My wife has a fake Chanel bag that she bought in Myanmar. It’s one of the “good” fakes and you really can’t tell the difference. The real bag costs about £4000! Hers cost around £20. Made from real leather and everything.
Because bags are seen as fashionable they can be massively overpriced.
The same is true of faddy coffees.
Have you also noticed that you can’t walk into a shop and buy a “cup of coffee” any more? You now have to buy some signature named coffee dish which takes 14 minutes to brew, hiss, gurgle and spit and came out of the bum-end of a cat. If you do ask for a “cup of coffee” the assistant, sorry barista, will look at you like you are an alien from the planet Zarg and you just told her you came to kidnap all the cows in the world.
There was a coffee shop in my home town long before it became fashionable and it barely survived by selling foods and doing deliveries of cakes. Now it has a roaring trade and they charge more for a cup of coffee than they used to charge for a whole cake.
This is what you think you’re doing :
You’re buying into some kind of coffee culture. Only it isn’t actually a culture at all as you all sit around silently staring at your fashion rectangle (macbook) while trying to surreptitiously look at the people around you wondering if their shoes are more expensive than yours or made from organic plankton.
This is why women go to expensive coffee shops :
To take inane selfies or immaculately posed pictures of tat on a table just so they can post on Instagram or Facebook about their “Me day”. I’m not being sexist here. Men are equally as likely to post pathetic “chilling at the cafe” photos as women, just possibly without the handbag.
And finally this is what the owners of these conglomerate coffee giants are doing as they artfully extract money from you and then very quickly send it abroad to avoid paying corporate taxes :
It’s safe to say I am not a fan of coffee shops.