NNOOOOOOOO. Don’t grind the market before you are ready to drink it! It’ll lose all the freshness!!
I’m just glad I quit coffee a year ago. I’ve known for a long time that coffee prices have been held artificially low and could explode at any moment.
It’s kind of a conspiracy theory of mine, but I’m trying to wean myself off coffee because I expect a price hike to come sooner or later. The majority of the Western world can’t get through the day without it, and I expect most people will still pay for it even when the price goes up.
Time for everyone here to research: Chickory. Alternative to coffee and you can grow it at home.
First eggs, now coffee?
Man, my breakfast is getting real slim nowadays.
It’s like those people saying quit your every day coffee/breakfast/lunch/cigarette and you will afford a house.
Quit your house so you can afford instant coffee.
Time to start the french special: bred, butter, jam and a cigarette.
With these tobacco prices??
It’s $46USD for a 25 pack of Winnie Blues in Australia right now.
Holy shit! At that point, you could probably turn a profit growing shitty tobacco in a greenhouse and selling it black market.
The black market is bigger than the legitimate market. It’s out of control.
We even effectively banned vapes. They can only be legally dispensed by a pharmacy, and the pharmacists want nothing to do with it.
Crazy. That’s effectively prohibition, and we all know what that does to black and grey markets.
I have given up on trying to fight my nicotine addiction. Vape with homemade liquid because I’m cheap and I want to know what’s in it. Smoke pipes and occasionally a cigar as I really love tobacco. May grow my own tobacco at some point just to play with it. (From the US)
Anyhow, potato vines contain useful amounts of nicotine that can be extracted and used in e-liquid. Atomizers can be easily made from nichrome wire. If you can’t get it direct, guitar strings can be a source of wire after burn off. Vegetable glycerin and propylene glycol are easy to get anywhere.
Atomizers can be easily made from nichrome wire. If you can’t get it direct, guitar strings can be a source of wire after burn off.
This is the kind of useful information I would expect from someone with handle like @machinist@lemmy.world.
But seriously, I cannot believe how much those prices are in Oz for cigarettes.
Caffeine tablets it is then… Oh wait I bet those are going to be affected too. Fun times
Cocaine it is then.
I picked the wrong week to quit methamphetamines.
The coffee price hikes have stemmed from lower production in important coffee growing regions, particularly in top grower Brazil, reducing the availability of beans.
That’s the closest I could find in the article as to a reason. It’d be nice to know if it was just a bad year or if this is going to be a permanent challenge going forward due to climate change or some other factors.
Coffee is quite sensitive to environmental factors and only grows in certain specific regions as a result. Those factors are being upended by climate change. Coffee is going to very rapidly become a luxury product.
Billionaires don’t care. Twenty dollars or two dollars for a cup is effectively the same price to them; insignificant. It’s the rest of us that get fucked.
Except we are nowhere near a situation like that. Articles like this don’t tell the actual prices because they are so small people might start questioning why they pay so much for coffee.
The poll had a median forecast for arabica prices at the end of 2025 of $2.95 per pound, a drop of 30% from Wednesday’s close and a loss of 6% from end-2024.
$3 per pound - $6 per kilo. Or to put it in another way, 4.8 cents per shot of espresso, two of which go in a 16 oz Starbucks latte that costs you $5.75, which would be enough money to buy 120 shots worth of bulk arabica.
If that goes up by 7% or 70% or 700%, the cost of that latte should hardly change.
Logistics cost money
Shucking and processing the beans costs money
Roasting the beans costs money
Exactly. And all of those stay the exact same price even if raw coffee price increases, meaning the price of a ready made cup of coffee hardly changes as the actual raw bulk coffee is only 1/60th of the total price of a starbucks latte.
How about this explanation:
There is a reduced supply of coffee beans. Let’s say 30%. This requires that 30% of customers have to be priced out of the market.
If the coffee shop owners only increase the price by several cents then the demand stays the same. They have to fight for coffee beans which drives up their costs step by step.
However, if they increase the price in advance, and far more than necessary right from the start, then the reduced demand matches the available supply and the value of the coffee beans roughly remains the same which allows them to profit from most of the price hike.
There is a reduced supply of coffee beans. Let’s say 30%. This requires that 30% of customers have to be priced out of the market.
this is fiction writing. you are literally making that up
What do you mean? There are globally less coffee beans available. Or do you mean the 30%? That’s just an arbitrary number, as I tried to make clear by writing “Let’s say …”.
You’d be right in theory - the cost of logistics should scale with weight or volume, not price - but we’ve already seen from the price shocks over the last few years that in reality corporations will always take the opportunity to price gouge on any upstream change, even when it has no impact on their costs.
But even putting aside the fact that capitalism will take it’s cut, you’re citing the potential impact of 700% price increases, but I’m not ruling out the possibility of 7,000% increases or higher. With the potential scale of impact that we could see from climate change, and how it affects delicate ecosystems like those in which coffee grows well, that’s not outside the realm of possibility.
Oh yeah, even a tiny increase in bulk price is a fantastic excuse to bump the profit margins for corporations, I’m not even pretending that wouldn’t happen in real life. Just look at the US egg prices and the massively increased profits of the companies selling them.
As for what’s the upper limit on the price increase in the long run, that’s quite hard to estimate, because the more expensive coffee becomes, the more options there will be for growing it in sub-optimal conditions. At some point, somewhere, growing coffee in a greenhouse becomes profitable to do.
Is that at $10/kg, $30/kg? $100? Over 9000? I don’t have a clue.But for quite a lot of people the coffee they currently drink is so ridiculously overpriced that even an absolutely massive increase wouldn’t have to mean they actually need to stop drinking coffee - to make a latte at home that was expensive as the one from Starbucks, the coffee itself could cost $350/kg - 15 grams of it would be $5.25, plus the milk. It would just completely kill coffee shops as a concept.
Coffee can be a pain to grow. As someone else mentioned, you have to have the right environment (rain, sunshine, soil, etc).
Adding to this is that it’s easier to grow other things that are in just as much demand. Vietnam has switched to growing durian fruit — less fussy and makes them just as much money.
Coffee is also quite carbon intensive.
From what I’ve heard this is largely due to bad weather due to climate change, as I understand it, we should not expect coffee prices to ever go back to where they were.
For the past 4-5 years it seems prices have only gone up here. It’s more than triple now of what it used to be before Covid, and that’s only 5 years!But I’m not an expert, this is just what I’ve been seeing as a heavy coffee drinker in the supermarket, and what I’ve gathered from short news tid-bits.
Pretty much. I watched my favorite coffee hut (literally a hut that you drive up to) go from $3 large like 5 years ago to $4, then within a year hit $5. At that point, I stopped going, although funny enough, i did go there today since it was convenient and it’s now $5.50… I laughed and said yeah I’m definitely done now. As much as I like coffee, it’s now a high-end luxury item that I can no longer afford even occasionally due to everything else raising as well.
My ground coffee has gone up about 20-30% over the past 2 years. This is just based on memory and not an exact calculation. It’s possible, I’ve misremembered the old price slightly, but either way it has gone up.
Here (Denmark) a pack of coffee 500g could be had for as low as $3 before Covid, now it’s very rare to see below $7. But most brands have decreased the size of their packs to hide it.
Also there are many that use capsules and other ways to make coffee, where the price isn’t as much dependent on the actual coffee, but more the markup of the brand.
It’s also due to very bad weather/floods in the second largest producer, Vietnam.
And since extreme weather events are increasing in intensity and frequency, it’s not going to get better (as a trend at least).
Looking forward to price hikes far beyond the actual cost to middlemen. The eggification of another good.
Already happened to chocolate. Raw cocoa is currently around 10% more expensive than it was at the same time last year - but chocolate products at retailers has shot up 40% or more. Including brands where cocoa isn’t the dominant component ingredient like milk chocolate.
Yet businesses like Lindt are celebrating a 7.8% increase in sales… Make it make sense to me cos I buy far less now. Who are the people who see these increasing prices and buy more 🤡
Source data: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/cocoa
Decades ago, in undergrad, I wrote a paper on recessions and the effects on everyday items. Oddly enough, the less money people have, the more likely that they will spend a tiny amount on luxury goods like chocolates. You add up all those people who buy small boxes of chocolates when they normally wouldn’t, and you’ve got your uptick in sales.
Yep, becomes a lot less important to save towards something when you have less than before. Those small luxuries are a mental health savior. That plus all the feel-good chemistry that happens with things like chocolate.
There’s no sense in saving towards something when it has suddenly become more than you could ever afford. Might as well buy some chocolate, it’s good for morale.
The GF and I were looking at houses a while back but never pulled the trigger. Fast-forward 4 or 5 years and now we will literally never be able to afford a house because the prices are fucking outrageous. We’ve given up and just spend our money on decent food instead.
Housing is so loony right now. I managed to borrow enough to make a downpayment before it got really crazy. For everyone’s sake I hope the market gets flooded with affordable units and crashes the values back down to where they were in the 90s.
I’m sorry for all the single mortgage havers whose savings is all their house, but we’re already better off than so many people just by paying the bank directly rather than a fucking land lord.
So, how much longer until we have to start drinking soycaf?
Fucking bummer. Everyone around me will crash and burn, and us non-coffee drinkers will rule the world!
Lol, it only takes a few days to no longer have withdraw effects of caffeine. Some Ibuprofen and Tylenol will take care of the headache in the transition.
A lot of people feel it for a lot longer than that, check out r/caffeinefree. For some it can take 3-6 months to stop feeling some effects
Interesting. Guess I’m lucky.
Physical withdrawls, sure. But its going to take a hell of a lot longer than that for society to get past its psychological dependence on caffeine.
Cut out the middle man. I just started roasting raw beans. Costs less than half as much as I was paying before and tastes better than I’ve ever had before.
You’ve only cut out the roaster, which does nothing to solve your supply issues.
Global warming makes coffee harder to cultivate, that restricts the supply, hence the price hikes. I guess coffee is going to be a luxury item in the future.
While the world is focused on its own problems, far right populism, and what not, we are oversleeping a great opportunity to rein in global warming. With douchebags like Trump at the helm, the crisis is getting worse and worse. I guess the kids of our kids will read about this time in their history books and wonder how stupid and egocentric we were back then.
That’ll work until the supply for beans really starts drying up.
