If we had to come up with a top 10 list of overdone coffee-themed articles in the media, one of them might have to be the top 10 coffee shop customer archetypes. BusinessWeek joined the fray in this week’s issue: Coffee Kinesiology – BusinessWeek.

BusinessWeek asked a panel of behavioral experts to evaluate and report on the “taxonomy of the 10 most common Starbucks waiting-line stances.” The study stuck to Starbucks (you mean there’s coffee anywhere else?) and to a lone Manhattan location (you mean there’s anywhere else?) to come up with their research. They also came up with ridiculous quotes about coffee costing $5.50; apparently inflation has hit the ever-popular $4 coffee myth.

That said, we still prefer the Five Types of Morning Coffee Crazies. Though earlier this week, Flavorwire posted a suitably racist version: Flavorwire » Stereotyping You By Your Starbucks Order.

What is it about coffee today that makes it such a lightning rod for consumer indignation and class warfare? Nobody expresses outrage over a $400 bottle of wine, a $110,000 MSRP Mercedes-Benz, or even a $300,000 diamond-encrusted smart phone. But should someone dare sell a cup of coffee for $12, the world is coming to an end.

And it’s not just the price tag that gets people taking up torches to Frankenstein’s castle either. Bring up a $12 cup of coffee, and angry mobs start asking about how much is going back to the farmers — or how much of the perceived price gouging should be donated to charity instead. Yet this reaction never happens with expensive wine, cars, or mobile phones. (We’ve even noted how this doesn’t even happen with tea.)

Because everything you do is really about me, me, me

People willing to splurge once in a while on a $12 cup of coffee are then invariably labeled “idiots.” But the same could be said of any passion or hobby that each of us spends our discretionary income on: wine, automobiles, NFL tickets, cable TV subscriptions, golf memberships, works of art, Disney vacations, etc. So why all the hostility as if a $12 cup of coffee were a personal threat?

In pearls before swine parlance, we are all swine about something that others deeply value. What makes coffee different is that we resent the suggestion of being “swine” when it comes to something we already relate to and experience. What could be presumed is that our taste in coffee is no longer good enough — as if what someone else drinks is somehow a value judgment about ourselves. Talk about insecurity.

One of the reasons for this cultural dissonance is that coffee is still largely perceived as a universal, utilitarian beverage of only marginal quality differences — an old notion rooted in coffee’s mass production in the 20th century. Another reason is the sense that specialty coffee has gotten too fancy for its own good. But yet another reason is that very few people in our complex society honestly know what things really cost — even if we all think we do.

Cost breakdown of a cup of coffee

Oscar Wilde once famously said that a cynic knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. Most consumers know the price of everything but the cost of nothing. Coffee is a prime example. This is what makes layman reporters’ eyes bug out when they see the $18,000 MSRP price tag for a Slayer machine. They think you’re launching the thing on a mission to Mars for that price, completely oblivious of the fact that a decent — and more “pedestrian” — La Marzocco GB/5 machine runs for more than $20,000.

When people complain about the mythical $4 cup of coffee — or the “How I bought a house by making my own coffee at home” myth — they commonly operate with the false perception that retail coffee is $0.20 ingredients and $3.80 pure profit. We’ve vainly tried to explain that the biggest expense in a cup of retail coffee is labor, not coffee beans, so this time we’ll try to back it up with public data.

One major challenge is that every coffee shop is different. Another challenge is that the figures are often obscured in research reports costing thousands of dollars. We unfortunately couldn’t reproduce a recent chart for Starbucks showing how much labor costs were their biggest expense in a cup of coffee. However, here we’ve plotted data from one UK report in 2007 and a BIS Shrapnel report from 2006 showing the production costs of a retail flat white (call it a cappuccino for American purposes).

The chart at left represents the cost breakdown for a major coffee retailer, such as Starbucks. It not only includes labor, profit, and local taxes, but there’s also an administration overhead that covers things like advertising and marketing expenses, utilities, insurance, etc. The chart at right does not include the overheard of rent, administration, nor profit; it more closely represents just production costs.

The thing to note here is how little the actual coffee represents in the price of a retail coffee — and how much its price reflects labor, rent, utilities, and other costs.

So when you’re buying a specialty, limited supply, microlot coffee for $12 a cup, the cost of the coffee beans can increase by an order of magnitude. But don’t overlook the impact of labor costs on the end price. A delicate, pedigree coffee can be wasted by “normal” brewing methods. While vacuum pots and Hario drippers do a far better job of showcasing the coffee beans, they are far more labor intensive than brewing in a basic French press or generic coffee urn.

New York City or Yakima, WA: Who has the more sophisticated palates?

Even if you can successfully explain the constituent costs in a $12 cup of coffee, that still doesn’t explain the recent media freak-out in New York City over it. Aren’t New Yorkers supposed to be the cultural sophisticates — and not the ones stepping off the Greyhound bus on 42nd Street yelling, “Golly!!! That there sure is one tall combine!” like some wide-eyed Kansas farm boy?

Contrast New York City’s recent reaction with a $14 cup of microlot coffee that ranked no greater than a mere footnote in the Yakima Herald in 2008:

And while supplies last, you can order up a $14 cup of coffee made from Nicaraguan beans that Stumptown bought at auction for $47.06 per pound. According to buystumptowncoffee.com: “Its thick caramel notes, Granny Smith apple, kiwi and apricot flavors had us awestruck and thirsting for more.”

When it comes to coffee, it’s as if New York City keeps inventing new ways to embarrass itself.

UPDATE: June 6, 2010
Tadias Magazine, which reaches out to the Ethiopian-American community in the U.S., published this article questioning why the same rare coffee can go for $12 in New York and $2.69 in Seattle: $12 Cup Joe in New York? Same Coffee Goes for $2.69 in Seattle at Tadias Magazine. Once again, to paraphrase Lance Armstrong, it’s not about the coffee. It’s about the labor. While the profit margins may differ, a huge part of the costs behind their pricing depends on how one café prepares the coffee versus another. Not to mention cost of living differences between café locations.

Please repeat after me, aspiring journalists and laymen alike: when you buy food or drink retail, you’re mostly buying labor. When you drop three bills for dinner at The French Laundry, you’re not primarily paying for a grocery shopping list of ingredients. This really shouldn’t be that hard to understand.

Not a day goes without us coming across a story about how the sky is falling on retail quality coffee. For example, ABC News laments, “How do you save on coffee in tough times?” Today the Chicago Tribune ran a semi-humorous column titled “Brother, can you spare (buying) a double latte?”

Each one of these stories reference both the tougher economic times and Starbucks‘ 97% decline in their most recent quarterly profits. Posters invariably comment on these articles, claiming that pricey coffee was just a faddish aberration akin to the Dutch tulip mania of the 1600s. All of which leaves us with the impression that the era of quality coffee is over now that we’re eating canned cat food. Right?

Except that this story is a load of crap. In fact, this is precisely what Starbucks’ PR team wants us all to believe: that “it’s the economy, stupid,” and that Starbucks’ problems are all external and not internal to the company.

The truth is far different from that. Starbucks is now paying the price for selling out its soul a decade ago — by making more automated, mass-produced, and ubiquitous coffee to meet its insatiable desires to grow as gargantuan as possible, as quickly as possible. But to believe Starbucks’ version of events, we need to conveniently ignore that rival Peet’s Coffee & Tea continues to grow — and that many other Starbucks competitors, such as Café Bustelo and Lavazza (both cited in today’s news), continue to expand their operations in this economic climate. And today, the future of quality coffee has less to do with Starbucks than ever.

And please — don’t get us started on the media myth that home espresso is the way for consumers to both have great coffee and save a lot of money. At least without spending a lot of time on it. We do propose that home espresso is about better quality, saving money, or saving time. However, consumers can choose at most two of the three — and quite often they can choose only one.

UPDATE: Feb. 12, 2009
Sure enough, the day after Starbucks announced thousands of additional job cuts in the face of mounting losses, Peet’s Coffee & Tea reported a 21 percent jump in quarterly profits. And while Peet’s has stuck to their upscale espresso beverage formula, Starbucks continues to bleed as it announces more downscale plans to offer fast food value meals and instant coffee.

Talk about a Dickensian Tale of Two Coffee Fortunes…

UPDATE: Feb. 15, 2009
Apparently it’s not just competitive chains that haven’t chucked their quality standards (such as Peet’s Coffee & Tea) that are growing while Starbucks falters. According to an article from the Associated Press yesterday, many higher-end, neighborhood cafés are also enjoying double-digit profits, baffling many economists: Many small cafes holding their own in recession | Business | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle.

One theory is that this represents more of a consumer backlash against large corporations — and that consumers are more judiciously spending their dollars on what they perceive to be higher-quality coffee beverages made by the neighborhood café’s well-trained barista. Given our longtime comparison between Starbucks and Mikhail Gorbachev’s rule of the Soviet Union, could the quality revolution among mainstream coffee consumers finally have reached a Boris Yeltsin phase?

We previously wrote of our annoyance with the old and ever-popular yarn spun by wannabe personal finance gurus who constantly tell us we can become millionaires by quitting our daily coffee habit — or by replacing it with home-brewed coffee. For the record, we have a lot of coffee both out (as evidenced by CoffeeRatings.com) and in the home. But we’ve always thought that home-brewed coffee is hardly the magic path to champagne wishes and caviar dreams. This time we do a little of the math to show why.

Many of these personal finance hacks first fail to recognize that coffee, for at least some people, is one of life’s small pleasures. The idea of giving it up entirely makes about as much sense as giving up other “superfluous” things in life — such as haircuts, your child’s dance lessons, and cable TV. Once you get past that logic, the debate then becomes about the private jets you’ll be able to afford by making your own coffee or espresso at home instead of paying Starbucks each time for the mythical $32 coffee beverage. (Hey … inflation. OK, so we’re exaggerating about the $32 beverage to make a point. But then again, so are they.)

We recently came across a blog post, similar to the thousands of others just like it, where a “home savings tip” savant posted on how she saved a “small fortune” by switching from her thrice-weekly Starbucks habit to a stove top Bialetti coffee maker at home.

Let’s do the math

Small fortune, eh? Let’s do the math. A $4 bucket of Starbucks’ pumpkin-pie-flavored Cool Whip, purchased three times a week, will set our home-savings-tip heroine back about $12 a week — or about $600 a year.

A new Bialetti will set her back about $20 — which is nice and cheap compared to some of these ridiculous $1,200 hulking piles of home espresso machine plastic that typically produce shots inferior to even Starbucks’ dubious standards (Jura, anyone?). Then add a chop grinder for about $30, and her capital outlay comes out to be about $50.

Now since fresh roasted coffee is like fresh baked bread, the supply needs replenishing every couple of weeks before it goes stale. So if she’s buying Starbucks’ coffee (and it is pretty much already stale when you buy it), that should set her back about $6 for a half pound. Then add some incidental charges for milk, pumpkin pie flavoring, and tubs of Cool Whip — but for the sake of argument, we will consider it negligible (which it isn’t).

That comes to about a $50 capital outlay plus $6 every two weeks = about $200 in the first year.

Labor costs: because your time isn’t free

Now let’s factor in labor costs. Starbucks’ costs are dominated by labor, not coffee. To say that your labor comes out in the wash is deceiving yourself: your time is money. The federal minimum wage is $5.85 per hour (in SF, it is $9.36) — and let’s say her time is only as valuable as the lowest fry cook at McDonald’s at $6 an hour. And let’s say that making these coffee drinks at home takes about 15 minutes of her time — between grinding, watching the stove, steaming milk, washing dishes, cleaning the espresso machine, etc. All the work that Starbucks pays someone else to do for you. Three times a week for a year comes to about 40 hours of labor a year = $240.

So in her first year, you compare her $600 Starbucks habit to $200 + $240 = $440. So she saved maybe a whopping $160 in the first year — minus her additional expenses for milk, pumpkin pie flavoring, and Cool Whip. And her coffee wasn’t probably nearly as good as the kind and variety she had buying out: the coffee supplies were probably more stale, the consistency wasn’t right, and she was using equipment and skills that were a fraction of what the pros have. (After all, a moka pot doesn’t even technically make espresso to begin with.)

Add that she had to put up with this inferior coffee for a whole year. Then add that she just valued her own time at the lowly wages of a fry cook working a burger joint fronted by a clown.

A small fortune? Indeed.

But what if you buy a $1,200 home espresso machine?

But at least she didn’t buy some $1,200 Jura (likely without a decent grinder, we might add) that will require her to grin and bear hundreds of inferior espresso shots before she breaks even on the purchase price alone. Or worse…

Home espresso machines, for most buyers today, are the home exercise treadmills of the previous decade. She could easily tire of the inferior shot quality she gets at home, and she could tire even more of doing all the labor herself. After all, we live in a society that can’t even be bothered to slice an apple or toss a salad because it’s too much effort. This means that not only does she return to her regular Starbucks habit, but she does so with an additional $1,200 hole burned into her pocket — now that her home espresso machine is gathering dust in the kitchen corner.

This is why we generally recommend a home espresso setup for less than five percent of the people who ask about one. Unless you’re in it for the pursuit of higher quality shots, you’re going to be gravely disappointed. Don’t even think that you’re going to save much money with a home espresso setup unless you can make the time commitment — and if your taste buds can’t tell the difference in quality.

Sipping a double espresso at Blue Bottle Cafe earlier this afternoon, I felt like a million bucks. In fact, that espresso shot of single origin, dry-processed, Ethiopian Sidamo was so good, it deserved its own post. (To be continued…)

UPDATE: Dec. 30, 2008
As dependable as an SF Muni bus crashing into a corner storefront, someone regularly exhumes another post of home espresso machine personal finance quackery: When a $945 espresso machine makes sense – Smart Spending Blog – MSN Money.

All this talk about “doing the math”… You know who has done the math several times over, before any of us even considered it?: Starbucks’ marketing department, that’s who. You can bet your double-tall, four-pump vanilla caramel macchiato that they know the lifetime value of their customers. And if Starbucks is devoting expensive retail space to selling home espresso machines in their cafés, how naïve does one have to be to think they’re doing it at a known net loss of customers and profits?

UPDATE: May 8, 2010
Yesterday we published a little research that shows some sample, third-party breakdowns of the actual costs that go into the price of a retail coffee: The social politics and economics of coffee prices | Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com. As highlighted here, labor costs overwhelm any ingredient costs — underscoring that the economics of home coffee making are really about how much you value your own time and labor.

UPDATE: Aug. 20, 2011
Thankfully, there are occasionally sane voices out there saying, “Saving money on coffee is the most useless piece of advice that a personal finance blogger can give”: A Cup of Coffee Isn’t Just a Cup of Coffee.

Props to the blog wcuk for one of the more thought-provoking posts I’ve read in a while: The Rise of Yuppie Foods « wcuk. It concerns the question of whether the diversification and specialization of common consumable staples — from coffee to wine to chocolate to the restaurants where we eat — is driven less by taste buds and more by “a middle-class need to distinguish itself through consumption”.

What else to explain the insane rise of the illusion of choice in the past couple of decades? More than just the pursuit of better quality and a greater variety of consumables, to a large degree it is the result of segmentation marketing — intending to target you, as a customer, to define and re-assert your own identity through your consumption habits.

One awkward, angst-ridden suburban teen’s Marilyn Manson T-shirt is just another person’s double-tall, four-pump vanilla caramel macchiato.

Or so the argument goes. Heady stuff. It would certainly explain a lot of the viceral, dismissive reactions and cultural resentment you now find against elitist gourmet products — as evidenced by the “$4 coffee” myth.

A brief history of modern consumer snobbery

Well, maybe it wasn’t entirely wcuk’s recent post per se that I found so thought-provoking. After all, I’ve long since dismissed use of the word “gourmet” as shorthand for a cheap marketing ploy to pass off canned pork & beans as maiale e fagioli in scatola with just one extra adjective. But his post referenced a fascinating historical review of specialty coffee from an anthropologist’s perspective, a paper titled: “The Rise of Yuppie Coffees and the Reimagination of Class in the United States” [PDF, 460kb].

As discussed in the paper, coffee got its start as an elite, rarefied beverage imported from remote corners of the world, made available only to the truly privileged. But in time, it became affordable, popularized, familiar, ritualized, mass produced, standardized and commiditized beyond all recognition of its origins. The quality dropped precipitously as the big players who dominated the supply market competed only for the lowest price.

It is only recently, in the past couple of decades, where have we witnessed the development of the specialty coffee trade — largely as a grassroots, Hail-Mary-pass reaction by small roasters to the dwindling number and aging demographic of regular coffee drinkers throughout the mid-20th century. And there was deliberate intent behind this transformation. The flavored coffee fad of the 1990s, which comedian Denis Leary immortalized with his desire for “coffee-flavored coffee”, was a direct marketing pitch towards soda-drinking twenty-somethings who didn’t drink any coffee. (These days you could argue that milk has largely become the new coffee flavoring.)

As the anthropologist puts it:

my newfound freedom to choose, and the taste and discrimination I cultivate, have been shaped by traders and marketers responding to a longterm decline in sales with a move toward market segmentation along class and generational lines.

You are what you, uhh … consume

And how does this relate to consumers distinguishing themselves through consumption? Citing more from the paper:

That there is a complex relationship between class and food consumption is often remarked, first in the obvious sense that particular groups occupy differential market situations in terms of their ability to purchase certain foods, and second in the uses various groups make of foods and food preferences in marking themselves as distinctive from or in some sense like other groups

It’s interesting and relevant history — the sort of thing that the self-described Third Wave coffee prophets tend to conveniently ignore. (If not outright deny its existence, like the architects of China’s Cultural Revolution. What is it with self-fashioned revolutionaries and their inability to cope with history?) And yet it comes from a paper written in 1996 — when Starbucks was only 1,006 stores in 21 states (it is now more than eight times that size in the U.S. alone, and it plans to add some 2400 new stores just this year).

Sure, like the Third Wavers, I still believe taste is big part of it. CoffeeRatings.com owes its existence to my first revelation espresso. But on the whole, there’s clearly a lot more to it than just that: coffee is a booming, not a dying, business today. Even if you don’t think coffee has become a mildly addictive fashion accessory, how do you explain all the new coffee drinkers — many of whom don’t even like coffee?

As with all good history, it pays to read it for yourself first.

Anthropologists really should take a closer look at the story of $600-a-pound coffee passed through Indonesian civet droppings, known as kopi luwak. This ‘news’ story has been repeatedly recycled across TV, newspapers, bloggers, and other media throughout the country for several years now — propagating like a Nigerian bank scam e-mail. And just like a Nigerian bank scam e-mail, it goes away briefly and yet comes back strong … as if no one has ever heard of it before.

Apparently, one of the last managing editors in the country to pick up this story is Leo C. Wolinsky of the Los Angeles Times: $600-a-pound coffee – Los Angeles Times. (Nice job, Leo. Looking forward to the Times‘ upcoming exposé on there being no WMDs in Iraq.)

It was over a year and a half ago when we wrote here about how this was a tired, old, recycled story. For example, kopi luwak coffee was even mentioned on TV episodes of Oprah Winfrey and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation back in 2003. Doesn’t that define the death knell for any trend? Rather than being trendy, the coffee has very limited production and attracts enough people — people curious about its price as well as its production methods — to keep its ridiculous novelty price up.

As a coffee, it’s not even very good. One complete fabrication by the Times is their opening sentence, “To connoisseurs of fine coffee, only one is good to the last dropping.” If the Times‘ Paul Watson bothered to do any research, he would have have learned that, to connoisseurs of fine coffee, kopi luwak is largely a novelty gag for the specialty coffee “tourists”. (Q: How does the fool who knows nothing about wine impress his guests? A: By buying the most expensive bottle he can find — along with a good story to tell about it.) Apparently there are enough people duped into equating price with quality that they probably believe that the U.S. Navy’s infamous $640 toilet seat was once considered the most luxurious in the world (to cite a story with similar “legs” from the early 1980s).

So why doesn’t this story go away? Something about this civet-dropping-coffee story has kept it in the public consciousness and imagination as if it were a trendy, brand new discovery about the excesses of gourmands — even when it clearly isn’t.

“Urban legend or weasel poop? Coming up at 11.”

The propagation of this story has mirrored that of many urban legends, even if the coffee itself is real. For an urban legend to have legs, it must hold a plausible kernel of potential truth, and it must also push buttons of the public subconsciousness to make people spread it. For the kopi luwak story, one of the subconscious buttons is undoubtedly the sense that specialty coffee has gotten too fancy for its own good.

For a few years now, people in the media (and in real life) have universally lamented “the $4 coffee at Starbucks“. But I dare you to find a cup of coffee that costs $4 at any Starbucks. But behind the “$4 coffee” statement is a sort of resentful, eyes-rolling, grandpappy-ish sentiment of, “I remember when coffee cost 50¢ a cup and tasted like black tar mixed with hot water — and that was good enough for everybody!” (If these people had their way, we’d still be eating all our vegetables out of cans.)

But don’t underestimate the role of desperate media outlets either. Faced with a slow news day (especially during those summer holidays), managing editors across the country often come face-to-face with dead airtime and empty columns. This is when they have to pull out their arsenal of ready-made, evergreen filler. And few things nicely pad the segue between Iraqi car bombings and Tiger Woods’ place on the leaderboard like a “Gosh, did you hear about this one, Bob?” story, complete with scatological animal references and snickering on-air banter between the anchors.

Years from now, somehow I just know that the civet will go extinct and we’ll still be subjected to this story. When in reality, for an even better media-ready rare coffee story, I’ve long advocated that we forget the weasels and go straight for “celebrity blends”. Tom Cruise, my offer still stands: my home-roasted coffee and your bowels could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

The business world is fraught with a number of ironies. One of the bigger ironies is that all good businesses must do ridiculous things that detract from the very core things that made them good in the first place. Big, public businesses do this in an effort to sustain the growth figures demanded by Wall Street (if not also out of fear), whereas small, local businesses do this to sustain interest among customers in their local communities.

In the world of coffee, this translates to a regular stream of new coffee product introductions — intended to keep consumers’ short attention spans engaged with the dancing monkeys of food marketing. Think Starbucks‘ new Dulce de Leche latte, the KFC Famous Bowls of the world of specialty coffee. Aesthetic and nutritional atrocities like this, of course, are necessary because it’s far easier and far more lucrative for food marketers to sell new fluff over the basics. And, unfortunately, it’s far more effective. Espresso drinks have provided a wealth of marketable perversions that failed under the old regime of “flavored coffees” (e.g., General Foods International Coffees).

Which brings us to a recent article in an industry rag: Getting more from your coffee menu. According to the article, the Beverage Service Association, a vending-machine-coffee business interest group, observed “the previously unknown concept of the rock-star barista, which is the coffee equivalent of the hero mixologist.” Is it any wonder why I’ve soured a bit on the deliberate media glamorization of barista championships? We’re trying to take barista skills towards its natural conclusion: a sequel to the movie Cocktail starring Tom Cruise as a competitive barista. (And you can bet Starbucks’ movie production arm would take an active interest.)

So you take some poorly made espresso, toss in some chocolate sauce and a rose-flavored syrup, and suddenly your liquid candy bar can sell at a much higher premium than a single espresso, let alone drip coffee. (When the media universally recites the “$4 Starbucks coffee” mantra, you know they’re really only talking about the double-tall, four-pump vanilla caramel macchiato.) But to some degree, those of us who love the fundamentals are subsidized by the many customers who shell out for that dreck.

If a café can’t get the basics right, they’re dead to me. If a pizza place can’t make a cheese pizza taste any better than the cardboard box their delivery boys carry it in, I don’t care if they make plenty of sales on peanut butter & jelly pizzas. But as much as I might detest what atrocities these fellow customers might drink, I need them to help keep the doors open on my supply of good neighborhood espresso. So today we salute you, Mr. Cinnamon Dolce Latte Drinker — you are a real man of genius.

There are few things that illustrate the great divide between the old, traditional way of looking at coffee and something of a more recent way than reactions to the price of coffee. (Neither way of which is more or less correct than the other, mind you.)

On the one hand, we have the new psychology of paying top dollar for the greatest crops available. Wednesday’s Chicago Tribune reported on the latest escalation of high-end coffee auctions: This coffee costs $103.90 a pound. Is it worth it? | Chicago Tribune. To some who have made it their hobby to notice the difference, it is worth it. To them, coffee is a fertile ground of culinary exploration. There’s a romance to it that’s somewhat suggestive of wine.

On the other side of the divide, we have people who respond to the same news with incredulous disbelief and outright ridicule. When people whine about Starbucks’ announcement to raise prices a whopping $0.05 per cup, these folks shake their heads at the infamous “$4 cup of coffee at Starbucks” — even if you cannot buy a basic cup of coffee at Starbucks for that price. On this side of the divide, the appropriate response to news of coffee price hikes are articles about where to get the most dirt cheap cup of joe available (e.g., Five Places to Get Cheap Coffee – washingtonpost.com). To them, and to most New Yorkers, coffee is a basic consumable just this side of tap water with little differentiation other than price.

Of course, the divide ultimately comes down to personal tastes. Some people value and can appreciate an expensive bottle of wine with dinner — they can taste the difference. While to many others it can seem like a complete waste of money for grape juice with a price tag that reflects nothing more than the varying degree of snootiness that comes with the bottle.

Like “red” states and “blue” states, this divide, like many others in this country, is one that people are just going to have to get used to.