Tea and coffee

[hannahwex]

Hi everyone

I work with a team of 5 people in a health centre. We are not employed by the health centre, we rent a room and are employed by the local hospital.

The practice manager has asked us to pay £10 per person per month for tea and coffee.

I have never paid more than £2 in any other workplace.

AIBU in thinking this is a bit steep or is it the norm these days

Thanks!

That's really steep. Is it posh tea and coffee? £50 a month for it. That's a lot of cups.

I would say that £2.50 per week for milk, tea, coffee and sugar is probably a pretty fair estimate tbh.

What coffee do they buy. Nice fresh stuff? Can you work out the maths?

Can you decline and supply your own?

£2.50 a week, 50p a day (ausuming 5 days a week) doesn't seem too bad really.

How many cups a day does everyone have?

That's just under 40p a day. If you have 5 or 6 cups and fresh milk that seems sensible.

We pay £6 where I am, which I think is more reasonable.

6 cups a day seems a lot. Do people get that many breaks?

I pay £2 per week, 4 day week. Seems reasonable to me.

Sparkling I'm a programmer. Most hours someone gets up and makes a round of brews to drink at our desks. 6 is a slow day...

I now realise this may not apply to a team in a health centre.

I think that's a crazy amount! I buy my own and don't spend anywhere near that much!
Pint of milk a week @ 55p
100 tea bags cost about £3, or a tub of coffee is about that
That's about a fiver a month and I never use all the milk (it normally goes off before I can finish it) so definitely cheaper if pooled...

£50 a month would buy a starbucks nearly every day!

Blimey Mines that's a lot. Think of the man hours lost to hot beverage making.

Teacher here. We pay 5 pounds for each half term of 6 weeks . Seems to be about right

Thanks everybody
Broken down into days I suppose it's not that much.

It's just regular Nescafe not posh coffee

My team home visits so not in the office all day, I think I average about 2 cups a day.

The rest of the team seem keen for us to start buying our own so I think that's what we will probably do

The problem here is that if you don't like the way the tea club's run, are you prepared to run it yourself? It's a thankless task.

£10 does seem a lot, but it is hard to estimate in advance (unless the club has a track record) What does it have to cover? Ours buys dishwasher tablets and biscuits, as well as tea/coffee/milk.

It does always puzzle me when people make the organisers job so hard object over the difference between £10 and £5 per month and yet regularly stop at Starbucks on the way into work.

Ultimately though, receipts need to be kept and if it's making a profit, every now and then you get a free month.

£10 does seem a lot, particularly for those who aren't in the building all day every day.
Just explain that, because you only get to have 1 or 2 cups a day, you'll sort yourselves out, thanks, and get a load of long life milk, some tea bags and coffee and you're away.

Wow that is a huge amount!

We have a tea/coffee club in work. Purchases are Dowe Egberts coffee, Tetleys tea, sugar, sweetners, milk. DE isn't cheap to buy.

There are about 25 of us in it and we pay £5 each once every 6 weeks.

So for us that works out at about £3 a day, for 25 people. And some of those people drink a lot of coffee.

Yours works out as £1.80 a day for five people.

Very steep IMO.

In fact, £1.80 a day for 5 is the same as £9 a day for 25.

So your costs are three times higher than ours.

10 for 4 weeks, is 2.50 a week, is 50p a day, is 25p a cup if you only have two a day. Seems pretty reasonable to me - electricity for boiling the kettle, water, milk, sugar, then the cost of water for washing up the cups, wiping down the surfaces etc. Minimal for those last things, but it all mounts up.

Do your own? I think tea clubs are probably only a good idea if you drink sweet, milky tea and coffee.

How does it work if everyone takes their own in but they take it in turns to make the drinks? You would be in there half an hour opening each jar/box.

Sparkling - If I offer someone a drink when making a round, I just give them stuff out of my jar (if they are drinking the same as me), however, in my last office, the round would normally be something like

1 decaff coff, 1 normal coff, 1 decaff tea, 1 fruit tea, 1 hot chocolate, 1 different sort of fruit tea, 1 normal tea - so you'd be routing in a load of different boxes anyway

OMG Back I couldn't be doing with that. It's bringing back memories of my time as an office junior having to put little slips of paper under the cups on the tray.

People used to just ask for water or water with milk if having coffee and add it later or put in their cup before you went. If having tea, they'd give you a tea bag and you'd do the rinsing when in the kitchen. I CBA with all that now and selfishly just do my own sugarless black coffee. They would take turns to buy the milk. And that's pretty much how it's worked in every office (lots) I've ever worked in.