£3.75 for a coffee

[CoffeePricing]

Just a flat white, is this normal? I live I the countryside, mostly WFH now.

I've just come to a local café for a change of scenery, and can't believe how expensive just a cup of coffee is now!

I think the reality is that there's going to be a significant reduction in the number of coffee shops/take aways/cafes/restaurants etc, especially those that offer food that is nothing special or unique (eg I read yesterday that one of the many big pizza/pasta chains was closing a third of it's outlets).

Unluckily for them, the number of people with the disposable income to pay the prices needed to keep them in business has drastically reduced, especially as they need to significantly increase their prices to remain profitable.

Hard agree. None of us want to live in towns with scores of closed down businesses and the entailing ugliness of it all. I'm sure, most of us actively want to support local businesses, especially the independents but they're making it very difficult for the majority of us to do so.

I don't always necessarily agree with the ' profits cut to the bone ' argument as an explanation for increased prices either, I think some of it is is down to pure greed and short sightedness. I'll give an example without being too outing - in my town there is a Turkish bbq restaurant ( not the kebab shop type!) In the best street in the area (historical tudor buildings/cobbled streets) where you can get a main meal for £5-7.50 (spit roast pork/ bbq fish/veggie casseroles type cuisine)/ a glass of red for £2.20 , a dessert for £2-3 ... A night out for 2 will cost you just over £20! Now, this isn't a plastic table cloths/ serve yourself type place - it's done out beautifully and service is impeccable. As you can imagine it's heaving every night.. Compare this to the other restaurants on the same street, charging 3 times as much - they're pretty much dead apart from peak fridsy/ Saturday night times. They would all have similar overheads, so how is the Turkish place doing it??

Waitrose cafe wanted £3.20, when I said I wanted to take away that went to £4.20. No thanks.

I recently renewed my home insurance with compare the market and one of the rewards is 25% off all Cafe Nero barista made drinks and fresh pastries, and you can use it twice per day. Combined with their loyalty card I think that works out pretty good value for occasional visits when compared to costa / starbucks. Just sharing in case helpful to someone

McDonald's coffee is tasty and reasonably priced.

The only coffee I find worth paying for near me is in a place where they offer you a choice of different roasts. It's IIRC about 4.50 for a cafetiere, which gets you about 1.5 coffees. They have a nicely done garden with plants around you that you can sit in the summer, and inside sometimes have someone playing on the piano.

Otherwise I only treat it as a cost to a social occasion. I can make coffee I enjoy more at home from an instant coffee or at work where we have a machine and they provide us with beans for it. I find it's often too weak. Perhaps places are trying to skim down the costs more now and using single shots where previously they might have used double. An espresso gives too little liquid to drink and so it's gone far too fast, but the Americano is now often quite weak. Hardly any place does any other kind of black coffee.

I have never had a good espresso in the UK. I'm not even a coffee connoisseur (I drink instant at home 😂) but espresso is always horrible. I'm not sure if it's the coffee, the training or the water!

I wonder if some places like you describe are heavily reliant on family for staffing and keep costs down that way?
There's a cafe near me and the food is really good, but it's genuinely family run with most members of the family doing something at some point, and it's cheap and like you say, busy too. And the service is good because the people working there are invested in it more than just a wage or the job being a means to an end.

I do think we have a societal bad attitude towards service jobs in this country, that it's a job anyone can do and only those who can't do any better do it past teens/early twenties and it's unskilled - or more accurately the skills that are needed to do it well are not valued.
But clearly good service is really important - yet people are surprised and angered at poor service delivered by people who are not engaged - but why would you be engaged with a job that is perceived that way?
You often see that customer service is shit in this country compared to other countries - but perception of the roles and attitudes towards them are also very different in other countries too.

And that's before we get to the shortage of staff available for various reasons.

It's not brain science but equally in order to deliver good customer service it does require certain skills and actually caring (or at least the skill to pretend you do convincingly!) About what you're doing.

I also agree that there is greed at play at times, but then that's the society we live in - and often people who accrue wealth are seen as aspirational and someone to admire, and of course money brings power and the more you have, the more power you have. So there's always the drive to make more.

I guess though that many places are facing an impossible choice, needing to raise prices above what people can afford during a COL crisis, but if they don't, not being able to meet their overheads - so either way they're not in a good place and face closure. And all that coming hot on the heels of enforced closure and then reduced capacity because of social distancing during covid.

I don't suppose there's any easy answers or quick fixes, if you don't use it you lose it, but equally if people can't afford to use it then the result is the same.

Yes, unfortunately. It's one of the reasons we now have quite an assortment of thermal coffee flasks and cups that come with us on journeys and I have lots of little clip it tubs for coffee, teabags, sugar, coffee mate that live in my work rucksack (currently at an organisation that thinks hot desking is the cat's pyjamas and with a canteen, sorry, staff restaurant as it likes to call itself, that doesn't want people in there with their own food or drink.... strangely morale is pretty low amongst all but the top bods....). They've not started charging us for hot water yet though....

I think some places don’t realise that you need to get value for your money. To be honest I would pay £3 or whatever for tea, if it was actually decent and actually hot. But most of the time it’s not and I feel like I shouldn’t have bothered.
I don’t get out much because I’m a carer but I went for lunch with a friend. It was nearly £12 for a crap panini and a drink, in somewhere that looked nice, but was cold and no atmosphere. I wished I hadn’t suggested it and we’d gone for a walk instead. I don’t think I would have minded if it had been at least good and filing, but it wasn’t. I can see why people just got to McDonald’s as you know what you are getting.

I paid £3.70 yesterday when I met up with a friend. Rural village with little competition, but you are paying for the ambiance and the lack of footfall in such a location. I would rather pay that than they went out of business and there was nowhere to get a decent coffee for miles.

@Whatevergetsyouthroughthenight I totally agree. Having a coffee shop in a village is a total boon. I would pay whatever (within reason) just to retain that business.

I'm in Greater London and that sounds bang on average for around here. Mainly independents here though rather than the generic chains.

£3.15 for a flat white M&S

Im in Dublin its around 3.40euro. It has gone costly everywhere. The coffee vans in our parks are around 3euro

It's over £2 in Greggs

Robbery IMHO

£3.45 for a large cappuccino at Caffè Nero in Bath Yesterday

Prets offer is now £30 per month

Same here. Saying that we have a number of independent cafes now and the food and coffee is nicer than the mass produced stuff at Costa. So I see it as a treat and hope they will survive.

It is £3.50 for a flat white in my local independent coffee shop. The beans and milk are organic, they pay a real living wage to their staff, there is good Wi-Fi and comfy seats. I don’t go often as it is quite expensive, but I don’t consider it bad value for money.

I paid £3.75 for a regular latte in a coffee shop in Kent today. I think that’s the average I pay really, but the location, service and coffee itself (which wasn’t huge) was much better than a chain.

I've only bought coffee out once in recent months and it was a soy latte that cost £4.

(Coffee van in a car park)

Normal where I live, big city.

Sounds totally normal to me for a nice ( non chain place).

As others have said, their costs have rocketed.

Crazy the change in replies from when this was first started in April till now

£3.75 is cheap anywhere 5mo later