My Moka Pot Cost the Station Café

A few years ago I decided to buy a good old Italian moka pot. I had seen prices go up significantly. I got the shock of my life when I did my end of year accounting and found that my coffee bill alone was a significant chunk of my monthly spend. I had drunk a week's holiday in the Mediterranean, one flat white at a time.

I care about it because it is a need product. The normal consumer like me loses because of rocketing prices. The café owner loses too, because wages, rent and tax rose like rockets and never come down. A flat white at Grind costs £4.10, and the café keeps 18p of it. guardian-flat-white Its founder gave the Guardian the rest in July: VAT takes 68p, staff £1.60, cups 55p, running costs 96p and other costs 13p. Both sides of the counter are losing, and the one cost everybody blames is the bean.

The Bean Takes the Blame

I thought bean prices must be up. For a while they were. Hot, dry weather over Brazil's coffee regions pushed arabica futures to a record above $4.20 a pound in February 2025. globe-arabica-record Red Sea attacks had already sent ships round the Cape, and container freight from Asia to Europe was up about 150 per cent. reuters-red-sea Then Washington put an extra 40 per cent tariff on Brazilian coffee from July to November 2025. white-house-brazil-tariff reuters-brazil-tariff Three crises, one small cup.

Inside a £4.10 flat white, the coffee is worth about 36p, the top of one roaster's own estimate per drink. bridge-menu-pricing Staff cost more than four times as much. The bean still takes the blame, because it is the cost customers forgive. In 1986 Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetsch and Richard Thaler found that people judge a price rise fair when the seller's costs have risen. kahneman-fairness A drought in Brazil is easy to picture. A wage bill in London is not.

A Third Off the Bean Is 12p

The same study holds the twist. People also judged it fair for a seller to keep prices where they were after costs fell. kahneman-fairness The economist Robert Bacon tested that pattern on British petrol prices in 1991: they rise like rockets and fall like feathers. bacon-rockets-feathers Coffee is now running the second half of the experiment. Arabica reached $4.38 a pound in October 2025 bloomberg-arabica-peak and was trading under $2.90 by February 2026. ucda-arabica-feb In June, Nestlé told Reuters it would take falling bean costs into account. The trade puts the lag from bean to cup at nine months or more. reuters-nestle-beans

Nine months on is now. A third off 36p is 12p, which is my arithmetic. A café that passed on every penny would charge £3.98. That is the feather, and it is the most a falling bean can do. I would not cancel the holiday over it.

The Costs That Never Come Down

The costs that do move only go one way. In April 2025 the National Living Wage rose 6.7 per cent to £12.21 an hour, govuk-nlw-2025 and employer National Insurance rose to 15 per cent. ni-secondary-2025 Nobody expects either to fall like a feather. Grind's 18p is what is left after them.

Scale should make a cup cheaper, and it does not. Caffè Nero's UK business grew its earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation by 17 per cent, to £45.2m. caterer-nero Yet in the Guardian's survey a flat white was £4.70 at Costa and £5.20 to take away at Starbucks. Lavazza's off Regent Street was £4.40 to take away and £6.50 to drink in. guardian-flat-white The big names charge more than the small one, not less. Whatever scale saves stays inside the chain.

The Wait at the Stove

I experience a different vibe, the vibe of making something myself, of being in control and creating a time out where I'm more in tune with myself, away from distractions and being in the moment.

That time out is what a café sells, and it charges for it by the cup.

The Couple by the Station

Making my own coffee in a moka pot curbed my addiction to coffee, because of the friction involved in making it. To break a habit you have to create friction. BJ Fogg's behaviour model needs motivation, the ability to act and a prompt, and "these three factors must occur at the same moment, else the behavior will not happen." fogg-behavior-model It helped me manage my finances better, but most importantly it propelled me to spend time understanding the structural, economic and sociological issues surrounding coffee.

My small local Italian coffee shop next to the station, family run and not as big as the large coffee chains, run by a lovely couple, stopped receiving my money.

Cafés Sell an Experience, Not Coffee

Cafés are selling an experience, not coffee. On this reading I was paying for a chair, a window and someone else's washing up, and the moka pot replaced only the cheapest part. Lavazza says as much in its prices: the £2.10 between its counter and its table is the experience, itemised. London has even tried charging for the experience alone. Ziferblat opened on Old Street in January 2014 at 3p a minute, with the coffee free. caterer-ziferblat The Shoreditch branch closed in 2018, and a new one opened in 2020 at 7p a minute. timeout-ziferblat The losses that make cafés look thin are often not about cups either. Starbucks UK's loss in the year to September 2025 sat close to the roughly £40m it paid its parent in royalty and licence fees. retail-gazette-starbucks

Part of that holds. The experience is real, and the couple by the station gave it to me for years. But apart from Lavazza, the board charges for the cup. Every rise in rent and wages lands on it, and a customer who wants only the coffee pays for the room anyway. City AM reported in January 2025 that Local Coffee & Grocery in West Hampstead stopped offering free wifi because laptop seats were costing it money. city-am-wifi That is the experience landing on the cup.

Utility Over Vanity

The coffee beans cost the same. I've switched the experience of a coffee shop to the experience of home-made traditional coffee in the Italian tradition. A consumer like me either has to value convenience and lifestyle over cost, or value economic utility over vanity.