From Office Coffee To Starbucks And Back


by Ken Raeside - Date: 2006-12-05 - Word Count: 562 Share This!

If you're like me, you're quite happy with Starbucks.

The service is always friendly. The barista wants to know your order while there are three people ahead of you in line. There's something comforting about that level of attention. It makes you feel like the valued customer you are. So when it's your turn to hand over four dollars at the till you don't think twice.

When I started working in an office in 1994 my boss introduced me to my new co-workers first, showed me where the Xerox was, and then pointed me in the direction of my desk while running to a meeting. Along the way she pointed out the location of the coffee machine.

Coffee? How much does it cost I remember asking. Oh, nothing she replied. The department pays. It took a second for this to register. For the last few years I had been paying $1.25 in the college cafeteria for brew of questionable quality. Some Mondays I suspected they turned off the heat to the machine the previous Friday, let it sit cold over the weekend, then re-heated it again on Monday.

But now the brew was free? Actually, it was better than that. If the coffee in one carafe looked like it had been sitting a while you could toss it and make a fresh pot. You can imagine how fresh the coffee was in my office.

Like all good things the free coffee came to an end. A very abrupt end. It disappeared altogether as part of cutbacks one day. But, help was only a few feet away. The college I worked for had opened a Second Cup coffee shop about thirty feet from my office. And the coffee it served was light years better than the stuff I drank for free.

Something happened after I drank my first good cup of coffee. I became a bean snob. This tends to happen when you discover how much better something can be.

Unfortunately, nobody informed my wallet of the impending disaster that was about to strike. A good cup of coffee is also a very expensive cup of coffee. Back in 1994 I was paying $1.60 a cup. In 2006 I now hand over $2.40 to Starbucks for a Tall Americano With Room. Several times a week.

I have a friend who likes to describe insane situations as "not sustainable". I have now arrived at a point where I spend more on coffee every month than I do on my phone+cable+internet service. This is the very definition of "not sustainable".

They say you can't go home again. Perhaps. But you can return to the office coffee if you have to save some serious money every month. Even if you have to pay $5-10 dollars per month you're still ahead of the game.

This time around I like to think I'm a bit smarter. I have a strategy for taming the vile brew and making it fit for human consumption. First off, I keep at least two bottles of flavored coffee whitener in the office fridge. Irish Cream and Hazlenut are good choices. I also like to keep extra packets of sugar in my desk drawer in case I have to drink my coffee black. I have also discovered if you drink two cups of office coffee before 10 AM you don't feel like a third anytime soon.

Office coffee. The price is always right.

© 2006 saving-dollars.com


Related Tags: saving money, daily expenses, controlling costs

Ken is the webmaster of a frugal living web site that lets people search for information on saving money. http://saving-dollars.com

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