Wow where does the weekend go? The PEI TweetUp on Friday night, Wine Show Saturday night and Fathers Day on Sunday – I guess that’s where the weekend goes eh? For those of you whom don’t have a clue and are wondering what the hell the PEI TweetUp was.. well, to put it simply – it was a gathering of people from PEI whom use Twitter. And it was a fantastic idea and went off really well I thought.
To the topic of this post, a conversation started at dinner Sunday night which I thought was a very interesting fact – and I hadn’t thought about it before then. It was the relationship or how similar coffee prices are getting to beer prices.
Large Double-Double at Tims – $1.68 (generally)… 1 bottle of beer ($20.99/12) $1.75. What’s scary is that my Robins coffee over in Stratford is actually $1.71 (why they would be more than Tim Hortons is beyond me..) Anyhow, so there is less then 10 cents difference between buying a beer at the liquor store and buying a coffee.. HOW RIDICULOUS IS THAT?! If you wanted to get really technical.. you can take back the bottles for beer and get $1.50 back for a dozen.. yeah, so that means that you’re paying only $1.62 for a bottle of beer.. which makes it CHEAPER than coffee!
If you wanted to talk about markup.. wow!! At least the ingredients in beer makes you think that some magical formula was created over time to make it taste so great. You’ve got barley, hopes, yeast, water, sometimes spices.. you need to ferment and you need to be extremely careful in the creation of the beer. Coffee ingredients?…coffee beans.
I don’t know the exact amount Timmies and Robins have marked up the price of their coffees, but you better believe that they have it set at an amount that will keep you buying, but still not scare away too many customers. Let’s say a pound of coffee today costs $9.00 give or take – that’ll make 30 cups of coffee.. yeah so that’s around 30 cents a cup. And they charge $1.68 for it.. which is over 450% profit margin (not including wages, etc). Holy smokes!! Do I EVER want to get in on that business right?? Well, why do you think they have a Starbucks, Timothys, Robins, Second Cup, Great Canadian Bagel, Tim Hortons, Beanz, etc all within about 30 seconds walking distance from each other downtown here? And that’s for a Tim Hortons coffee.. can you imagine the markup on a Starbucks?
Like I said before, at least with Beer you’ve got a bunch of different ingredients and you know that it takes some skill and effort to make that beer and replicate it over and over and over again. Yes, the markup is likely huge on beer as well, but certainly not the crazed amount coffee is.
Obviously we, the consumer can combat these prices by purchasing our own coffee – buying our own, bringing your own cup, etc. For myself and Liz, I calculate that we get about 2 weeks of morning coffees (made from our french press) for about $6.00 – that’s 14 coffees or about $0.43 a day each. I’t may be more or less than 2 weeks but I’ll know for sure soon as I have to rebuy a can today so I’ll know how long it lasts.
I still need about 4 cups this morning after the weekend though.. wow.