What's the deal with coffee?
As I routinely plunked down $3.01, yesterday, for a latte at a downtown Starbucks (warning: prices may vary in your area), I daydreamed of days when a cup of coffee and a doughnut, ordered in an average Main Street coffee shop, would set you back ten cents -- i.e., a nickel each. (Back then, I of course had not yet learned to tolerate -- let alone crave and/or physiologically demand -- coffee, but I certainly was alert to the price of doughnuts.)
A nickel in, say, 1954 was the same as 43 cents in our inflated 2013 dollars.
Now, admittedly, my latte today had milk in it, as well as coffee -- but cream and sugar came free in our not-so-distant pre-espresso past. And, also admittedly, as Starbucks reminds me, I'm paying not just for coffee, but for the total experience, the joy of immersing myself in the ambience of their magnificent cafés. But whether espresso or "brewed," with or without dairy components, at a coffee house redolent of 1910 Vienna or at Sloppy Joe's Real Fine Eats, I dare you to locate a cup of coffee anywhere for 43 cents in today's world. For 43 cents, you won't find even a spoonful of instant coffee half-dissolved in a cup of hot water. For 43 cents, you can't get even one of those cardboard cups of luke warm dreck that comes pouring out of a vending machine.
On the other hand, in 1948, you would spend $249 for a Bendix washer. In today's dollars, that would be $2,397. A little pricey, right, even for the better washers available nowadays at Best Buy?
As a nation, we've found ways to provide far cheaper (and better) washers. As well as TV's, vacuum cleaners, and even automobiles.
But coffee? Not so much.
No comments:
Post a Comment