I find it hilarious how painful starbucks has made the process of ordering coffee. I only drink drip coffee and think we deserve a distinct queue. This phenomenon has, a little distressingly, spread to places like dunkin donuts. People love to drink their sugary milk with a splash of coffee, I guess. I don't begrudge them this but I do question paying $7 a day for what must be a significantly-increased chance of getting diabetes. Curiously, these same people often turn their nose up at equally-sugary soda. You'd think people would just learn to make this at home with a moka pot and a milk skimmer that costs less than what they paid for a single drink...
Between this and the inexplicably high cost of hot black coffee, i've just given up ordering from "coffee shops" and buy it from wendys and mcdonalds instead. The coffee is both cheaper and delivered faster and it could taste a lot worse.
> inexplicably high cost of hot black coffee
My guess: if the prices reflected the marginal costs of the product inputs, amortised machine wear and ingredient storage and handling and the labour to make, black coffee would be so much cheaper that it would attract too many people away from higher-priced, higher-margin options.
Prices are based on analysis of the effect on demand rather then as a representation of the cost of the item to produce relative to other products.
McDonald's for example has cheap black coffee, because it's an incentive to get you to buy some overpriced food at the same time. Whereas a coffee place is primarily just selling the drinks.