Not to mention that I don’t buy into the deconstructed, non-integrated, superpositional microeconomic thinking upon which these hypothetical debates rest. If you applied the same principles to weight loss in isolation, they would suggest that we should be a nation of emaciated supermodels instead of tragically obese ever since the public wholly embraced diet soft drinks 20 years ago.

However, from a personal finance point of view, that “small pleasures” costs can add up, especially for those who can rationalize the cost and want things now and are unable to save long-term. Also, who has coffee 3 times a week? It’s more like 3 times a day!

Plus, you should consider that the $600 is money spend after taxes. You’d need to work say $850 unless you could somehow write those off as business expenses.

You should also not consider factoring your working hourly wage when making it at home unless you would have used that time to be working and making money as opportunity costs. Chances are at home, you’d be reading a newspaper or checking your email. Might as well take some personal enjoyment in making your own espresso … perhaps by saving that $400 (more if saved in a tax deductible investment) a person could open their own small cafe when they are financially free to do anything they want.

That said, if I had a couple K floating around, I’d probably go for a home setup.

When you spend $4 on a bucket of Starbucks’ pumpkin-pie-flavored Cool Whip, you’re mostly spending money to cover Starbucks’ labor costs. People whine and lament that Starbucks is ripping people off because you can get a cup of coffee for a mere $1 down at the diner — but the diner need only have an untrained monkey take 3 seconds to dump a Bunn warmer coffee pot into a styrofoam cup: there’s no timing for an espresso shot, no preparation of milk frothing, no pumpkin pie and Cool Whip mashing. The big difference is labor, but nobody seems to recognize that. All coffee is just “coffee”, right? Wrong.

You’re fooling yourself if you think your time is free and therefore worthless. Any 15 minutes you spend making your own bucket of pumpkin-pie-flavored Cool Whip is 15 minutes you’re not answering customer service calls working for The Man, 15 minutes you’re not making millions off online stock trades, or 15 minutes you’re not writing that hockey-stick growth business plan for your new start-up. The economics of making coffee at home versus having it out is a primarily question of labor costs, not materials. Analyzing it any other way is a false premise.

For the people who drive special to get coffee, it’s not like they were probably going to play shut-in for the day. Or that their steady home supply of coffee, milk, pumpkin pie flavoring, and Cool Whip comes out of the tap. Of course, where I work, a Peet’s is just down the stairs…