What’s the value of takeaway coffee?
I’ve been working in coffee shops a lot over the past few months. Like many of the laptop warriors, I buy my drink, and settle down to work for as long as I can, before my inner monologue guilts me into buying something else. (The staff at my local Costa Coffee are really easygoing, no guilt from them).
Meanwhile, most of the people that I see coming in to coffee shops leave minutes later with a drink in their hand. They get a coffee in a paper cup, and they’re out the door. And they pay the same price that I pay for a coffee (if I actually drank coffee) in a nice ceramic mug, sitting on a comfy sofa with Jason Mraz or similar music playing in the background. Does that mean they’re getting a bad deal?
The value of the coffee and drinks at your local Starbucks or artisan coffee shop include the value of the drink itself, the effort and assurance of manual craft undertaken by the baristas, and the convenience (which varies). Everybody gets that. But the original value of the coffee came from Starbucks’ and others’ importance as a third place, somewhere other than your home or office but with the same creature comforts.
Pine and Gilmore’s The Experience Economy argues that customers should be charged for an experience rather than the product, so that they give value to the experience. That can be done overtly, as the authors seem to prefer, or it can be done in the way Starbucks did, by making it clear that the experience and the product go hand in hand, and that’s part of the justification for their higher prices. But as people became accustomed to relatively decent quality coffee and its higher prices, the value seems to have shifted from the experience of having a place to enjoy the product back into the product and its creation in front of you. For a huge number of people, and a huge portion of coffee shop revenue, that creation is the only experience that customers are getting.
So I do think I’m getting a great deal, sitting there smugly as people rush in and out, paying for a drink that for me came inclusive with use of, what is really just a shared living room. But the truth is that comfortable seating has lost its value, as it has become more ubiquitous in casual eateries and coffee shops.
Does that mean coffee shops could all get rid of their seating, drop their rent and staffing costs, and still keep most of their customers? Sitting there, I start to think so. There are obviously more quality coffee stalls appearing with prices matching comfy indoor coffee shops. But maybe knowing that coffee shop is warm and welcoming with seats to spare does add value to the takeaway coffee; a kind of “we know you don’t have time to sit on the sofa and drink this, but if you did have time, you’d be more than welcome”. Maybe that’s what the barista is thinking. Maybe.
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Thanks for reading. Let me know your thoughts on this in the comments below.
