The Math Behind Cigarette Smoking and Starbucks Coffee
How much is your habit really costing you?
Let’s use averages and have fun with math
The average pack of cigarettes in the United States in 2022 is about $8.00. In some places like New York State, a pack of cigarettes can average up to $11.96 with the lowest prices being in Missouri at $6.11 a pack. For the sake of argument, I’m not going to pick Missouri or New York to calculate the math here. I will use the national average to show you how much your habit is costing you annually.
The national average for the number of cigarettes smoked per day is 14 cigarettes. I don’t know if I buy that, most smokers I know usually finish a pack a day. I will base the following numbers on a pack-a-day smoker over the course of a year. Also, many people who smoke I’ve noticed also drink coffee.
Let’s combine the two or you could just see them as separate addictions if you’d like
My example may not be a super common one, but I’ll add a Starbucks coffee per day to a pack-a-day habit. I do, after all, know a lot of people who go out to Starbucks and smoke cigarettes so I can justify this pairing in my own mind.
If you want to just see these as separate habits, then you can consider my individual tabulations. Let’s start, there are 365 days in a year, and one pack per day at $8.00, the total over the course of the year that you’d spend on cigarettes alone is $2,920. If you didn’t have that habit and you could save that much money or use it towards more valuable resources.
Starbucks Coffee and the cost of going five days per week
Now, on to Starbucks Coffee. I will choose the most popular drink at the chain and look at the average cost there, then I will do the same calculations there but then will limit the number of days to work days per year as most people who go out for Starbucks either do it on the way to work or anyone else who frequents Starbucks, we’ll just assume that five days a week is the limit on this habit. If there are those who do more or less, those can be attributed to outliers.
A venti skinny vanilla latte at Starbucks is $4.65. Five days times 52 weeks a year is 260 days. That means that we will multiply $4.65 by 260 days is $1,209 a year. Now let’s go ahead and add our two figures and see what a pack-a-day smoker and caffeine addict pays every year to feed their addictions. $2,920 a year+$1,209 a year=$4,129 a year.
What could you spend all of that extra money on instead?
What could someone spend $4,129 a year on instead? Since I’m assuming that this money won’t be saved otherwise, I’m not going to list things that would cost that much. I feel like I should divide this number by 12 to get a more accurate assessment of items that can be purchased otherwise. $344.08 a month? That’s a lot of extra money.
I know that this is similar to my little brother’s pack-a-day addiction and then buying a large Monster can per day, sometimes two. $344.08 a month. That could be an entire lease payment for some models. I mean, you could probably purchase a cable, internet, and phone bundle with some decent add-ons but I definitely won’t encourage cable use here. Cable is dead in the water and if you still own cable, you are way too far behind the modern times.
You could even spend that money on a decent bus trip to a city near you that you’ve never been to before. Heck, you could probably even fly round trip a few places. Vegas is always a cheap flight.
You’re addicted, I get it, just wanted to show you what your extra money could give you
The point is, I get it, you’re addicted. But if you ever decided to break your addiction, you could free that money up to do so many other different things that your addiction limits your spending from achieving.
And Gilbert, if you’re reading this, I can’t fault you for drinking all of those Monsters because those are pretty good and they definitely keep your energy up as you work so many hours per week.
This was a fun little story involving basic math that I enjoyed sharing. Thanks to Gaurav Jain and Sally Prag for feeling inspired by my writing about many different random topics. If you want to read a story entirely about Instant Pots, I have two of them. Check them out below and thanks for reading.
