I arrived at my local coffee shop with plans to write for a few hours. I stumbled in and a cozy, warm wave of heat greeted me. The amber lighting reminded my eye muscles that they no longer needed to squint, and they noticed steam rising from the espresso machine like a locomotive, prepared to deliver us all from exhaustion.
All aboard, I thought.
Michael Bublé percolated through the air and the walls and gave everyone a bounce in their step - a musical equivalent of the liquid vitality that awaited me behind the counter. Everyone and everything in that shop, including the dogs that someone brought, had a perkiness about them, as if this was the place that ideas were born and the sun not only revolved around this place, but also recharged its warmth and filled its mug here, like the rest of us. I had my trusty sidekick and memory maker, my majestic navy pen and journal, tucked neatly in my backpack as if I were a cowboy and they were my holstered law and order. All I was missing was caffeine.
I stood in line, and scanned the menu.
If only they could just wheel it out and IV me with it, I thought.
My choices came down to a drip coffee, cappuccino, or flat white. Something about a morning pre-write flat white never fails to get the juices flowing. My eyes locked onto the white chalk scrawled on the board and then slowly grinded along the ellipses to the price on the right hand side…$5.
My body tensed up slightly and bristled at the thought of parting with $5 for some energy bean juice. I could’ve just stayed at home and piped that fresh Joe goodness down my gullet for a fraction of the cost.
My mind fought me: Is it worth it? Shouldn’t I be saving this for something better?
As the Conductor of Caffeine asked for my ticket, I was forced to shrug it off and order.
One Flat White please.
Seeing a drink sold for $5 - and willingly paying for it - goes against my conditioning.
I’ve read tons of blogs and books on personal finance over the years. The traditional advice is to live below your means, save more than you spend, and ruthlessly cut your spending on frivolous things. This is sound advice (and common sense) and following it will allow more pennies to accumulate in your account.
If you go to the coffee shop every day, 50 weeks a year and buy a coffee for $5 a pop, that’s $1,750.
That’s a significant amount of money you could be saving. And if you have a spouse that goes too, you can run the numbers and imagine the vacation you can now afford and hear Bob Barker excitedly exclaiming: Come on down!
If you’ve never been aware of your spending or if you actually need to scrape together every spare cent to pay the bills, or you are a tropics enthusiast, not going out for coffee is good advice. The thing is, after a certain point, the $5 doesn’t make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things, but the guilt about spending the $5 stays.
To Buy the Coffee or Not Buy the Coffee, That Is the Question
Whether you should go to a coffee shop or not depends on your answer to this question: How do you go about it?
If you find you’re already half-way to Starbucks before realizing it or stewing in a soup of anger because the guy in front of you is just too chipper and he can’t decide and you have a meeting to…hurry it up ya jackwagon!
Is this really the way you want to experience life?
Or if every month you curse yourself when you look at your credit card statement because you realize, guiltily, that you mindlessly spent enough money to meaningfully contribute to something you actually enjoy.
It’s time to take a step back.
Do you deliberately decide to go to buy your favorite coffee because you love it?
Because you’re meeting up with old friends?
Because you can’t wait to dive into that book at long last?
You should go to the coffee shop and buy that coffee out of enjoyment or for the delicious taste you just can’t make on your own. The coffee shop can be a homey place of refuge and a place to incubate your best ideas. Are you using it for that purpose or are you using its wares to overclock your nervous system to make it through one more day?
It’s simple math. If you are consciously making the decision to go and savor what you’re doing, the $5 is worth every penny. You’ll never miss it and you’ll never miss out on becoming a millionaire because you failed to save it.
If you're there for the right reasons, $5 is just the price of admission. If you’re there to soak in that peppy jazz, or to feel a sense of community bustling around you as people go about their day, or let the caffeine fuel you to write the next great novel, it’s worth it. You enjoy it and you’re there on purpose, for a purpose. That never needs to be justified. No need to feel guilty thinking about what else you could be doing with that money.
Just buy the coffee already.
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Big thank you to
Justine Jones from Write of Passage for your feedback on this piece.
I don't know how it is in the US, but here cafés with well-sourced well-roasted beans, well-trained barristas, well-selected milk, and top-of-line espresso machines and grinders are labors of love. They tend to be subsidized behind the scenes by more traditional businesses like agriculture or construction (you can't price too much above Starbucks), so even though I pay 20x what it costs me to make an Aeropress cup myself, I'm actually getting a discount.
I also always go for the flat white. When I'm unsure of the quality of the coffee in a cafe, I ask the barrista what's the diff between a latte and a flat white. The answer reveals how much of a coffee nerd the barrista is, which is an indicator of how well the owner takes care of everything else that goes into making a cup of coffee.
I spend an atrocious amount of $$ on coffee and will continue with reckless abandon :) if you’re ever in Calgary, we’ll go enjoy the heavenly foam of a well-made cappuccino. 30% discount if you’re 🇺🇸 haha