Inflation, simply put, is when prices on things go up. It’s happening in Singapore right now. Some of it is because of the increasing price of petrol. Some of it is because the GST increased (but only by 2%.) Some of it is also because everyone suddenly seems interested in buying property.
And some of it is caused by Starbucks.
While I’m no scientist, and I have no proof to back up this assertion, I firmly believe Starbucks has convinced us coffee costs more than it really should.
If I buy tea at Canteen One from my favourite canteen auntie, I pay 35 cents. When I buy it from my hawker center, I pay 70 cents. When I buy it from Starbucks, I pay $4.10, even though I drink it from a re-usable mug so there’s little wasted packaging materials. How could this be? How could the price increase over 1000% between Canteen Auntie and Starbucks Barista? They both have jobs and need to be paid, so we can’t claim it’s salary costs.
The bigger concern I raise this week is the Starbucks effect the store has had on our everyday life. We’ve somehow become convinced coffee is expensive. The moment of realization occurred to me Sunday night as I was taking the Vivocity shortcut on level 2 that sneaks through Best Denki. After working my way through the crowd of people who watch entire films in the HD TV section (cheap asses!), I stumbled upon an elaborate display of cappucino makers (for those of you who only drink at the hawker centres, cappucino is coffee with some frothy milk on top.) It looks like Best Denki is pitching the home cappucino maker as its signature perfect Christmas present, now that it’s glutted the market with flat screen TVs, digital cameras, and iGallops.
What struck me about this was the price. I told my friends it was expensive and asked them to guess. They tried $500. Higher. They went up to $700. Higher. They were shocked. We kept going until we reached the actual price of the product: $3700. My friend remarked you can buy a used car for that. I was so stunned I asked the salesperson hovering (you notice how they always hover at Best Denki?), “Who buys something like this?” I suppose, if it could make lots of cappucinos at one time, this may be a useful purchase for a restaurant, but it doesn’t. According to the sales pitch, it does all the work for you, even frothing the milk.
The part I haven’t mentioned was the salesman didn’t share my shock about the price, because there were an assortment of coffeemakers costing over $3000.
Even at Starbucks prices, you would have to make over 500 cups of cappucino before you broke even on this machine. And if you’re satisfied with the simple coffee at the canteen, you’d have to make more than 30,000 cups of coffee. Oh Starbucks, you have wronged us all!
5 December, 2007 at 3:44 pm
This is the probably the most knowledgeable information on Starbucks I’ve ever read. I still love vanilla frapuccino!
5 December, 2007 at 7:12 pm
tomorrow (thurs, 6 dec) starbucks giving out free drinks!! well, at least, that is what my friend said who is working there(;
22 January, 2008 at 11:09 pm
This post makes me so happy that my intake of coffee is limited to a starbucks frap once every 2 months.
14 March, 2008 at 3:26 pm
Hmm.
You say that at Starbucks, coffee costs more than it really should.
However, your price comparisons are for tea …
And even if you really meant to compare coffee prices, you don’t really get the same product from the hawker centre and the Starbucks. Hawker centre: frill-less coffee. Starbucks, you are paying for not just the coffee, the airconditioning, the sofa… not just what you can see, but also the concept and the intellectual property embedded in Starbucks.
You say that Starbucks contributes to inflation.
Inflation refers to when the overall price level rises (not when the price of a single good increases or if one place sells a product at a higher price than elsewhere).
Starbucks would contribute to inflation if a) it increases its prices year on year or b) it causes the hawker centres, etc. to raise their prices (which would be hard to prove).