Wake up and smell the coffee – at home
I AM astonished that people can spend as much as an average £2,111 a year in coffee shops (Mail). A 250g pack of coffee beans in a supermarket costs £3. It takes 8g of ground coffee to make a double espresso or an Americano. Typical coffee shop prices charged are £2.20 for a double espresso and £2.40 for an Americano. You can get 31 cups from a bag of coffee beans, but the cost to the customer in a coffee shop would be between £68 and £74.50. Quite a mark-up on £3 worth of coffee beans. I appreciate that coffee shops have to employ and train staff and install equipment, but even so, a mark-up of more than 2,000 per cent on the base product might be seen as just a bit greedy. I suppose that in a coffee shop you also have the pleasure of queuing for ages to get served, balancing your cup amid the debris left by previous customers on a dirty table and enjoying the ambience of the noise and clatter going on behind the counter while other people’s children and dogs roam around the place. That’s got to be worth something, but not a lot in my book! You can buy a decent espresso machine and coffee bean grinder for about £300 for domestic use. And for the remaining £1,800, you can enjoy around 20,000 cups of coffee.
R. HAVENHAND, Nantwich, Cheshire.