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Comment by datadrivenangel

10 hours ago

But add a $3.50 coin so that we can strongly incentivize coffee to stay below a certain price.

I know this is supposed to be a joke but... businesses have pushed for this the other way around in the past, asking for a new coin to raise prices.

> The Coca-Cola Company sought ways to increase the five cent price, even approaching the U.S. Treasury Department in 1953 to ask that they mint a 7.5 cent coin. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_price_of_Coca-Cola_from_...]

  • The wikipedia article says that this was specifically the price of a 6.5oz Coke.

    The obvious way to raise the price by 50% is to cut the amount by a third, selling 4.33oz Cokes.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/BottleDigging/comments/1kng6aq/coca... suggests that Coca-Cola was comfortable producing bottles in several different sizes.

    Now, a 4 1/3 oz Coke is obviously too small to be worth bothering with. But that's also true of a 6 1/2 oz Coke. These sizes seem more like something you dispense with an eyedropper than something you drink. A normal can is 12 oz! Who'd want to buy a six-ounce beverage?

    You can address both problems at once by doubling the price and increasing the volume all the way up to 8.67 oz.

    • When I was a kid, most sodas had a short can size of 8oz available, good for "lunches" and similar.

      Funny story, Coca Cola just announced thin 7.5oz cans last month, to be available in January.

      Shrinkflation is often done by phasing out an old size, often by jacking up the price first to aid the sales of the "family size" version on its way out, and then introducing a "New" size that's just a bit smaller.

      3 replies →

One of the things I admire most about Italy is how they have held the line on the price of an espresso.

It’s still just slightly over €1 if you drink it standing at the bar.

They really have their priorities straight when it comes to food and drink prices.

My local just went from $3.50 to $4 this week :(

  • Gourmet high-end Keurig pods are like $0.50 each. Make your own coffee.

    • If you go through coffee regularly, it's actually quite a nice thing to invest in. There are a really amazing number of craft roasters throughout the country, and simply having a quality grinder is enough. And you don't need a crazy espresso setup to enjoy it. My setup consists of a motorized flat burr grinder, a 20$ kettle from target, and a pour over funnel. The quality is so much higher than anything you can get from a pod that's been sitting around with pre ground coffee, and it only takes a couple minutes while you're waiting for Claude to rewrite your codebase in Rust or whatever it is "Hackers" do these days

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    • If you want to save money get a Moka pot instead of that Keurig garbage.

      Even cheaper, tastes better, and takes only slightly longer to make.

    • You can solve this problem even better by drinking instant coffee. Bonus points for it making yuppies cringe.