++Your expensive coffee habit is indeed getting even more expensive. +
++That Pumpkin Spice Latte is going to cost you a pretty penny this fall. +
++If you are a connoisseur of fancy coffee and fancy coffee shops (or even just fancy-ish), you’ve probably noticed that the price of your favorite drink is higher than it used to be. Nowadays, the base price for a regular latte is something like $6, then maybe you add in vanilla syrup, which costs you an extra dollar, and ask for oat milk, which is a dollar more. You’re now staring at an $8 drink, plus taxes and, assuming you’re doing the right thing here, at least a $1 tip. +
++What, you might be asking yourself, is going on here? You are not alone. Why is my latte so expensive? is indeed a perennial question. And to that question, at least the 2023 version, I’ve got answers. +
++(I’m going to insert a semi-long aside here, which is that obviously you can make your coffee at home or go somewhere less expensive, like McDonald’s or Dunkin’ or a coffee cart, which all run under $4 for a latte. You can also get just regular black coffee, or add in just regular milk, and it’ll run you a whole lot cheaper. Your latte, your choice.) +
++Anyway, back to why lattes are expensive. I spoke to a Starbucks analyst and three people in the coffee business to get some explanations. +
++The cost of your latte is more than the coffee and the milk +
++The long and short of why your latte is more expensive is that almost everything is more expensive than it was a few years ago. That, of course, includes many of the inputs that make your latte price your latte price — from the coffee and milk to the wage of the worker drawing that cute little flower onto the top of the drink. Coffee is a commodity, so its price goes up and down — its price has actually come down from its 2022 highs. You also maybe notice the rising latte price more because it’s something you buy relatively often, and it’s the only thing on the receipt when you do. +
++Caleb Benoit, founder and CEO of Connect Roasters, a wholesale coffee company that’s about to open its first cafe in Bourbonnais, Illinois, laid out some rough numbers on coffee shop economics. Judging only by the coffee, milk, and lid, the margins for a coffee shop on a latte look great, like 70 to 80 percent. But that’s without the overhead. “I think most healthy coffee shops are probably paying 30 percent of their revenue out in labor and probably another 10 percent in fixed costs, like rent and utilities,” he said. “You factor all of that into the equation and your, let’s just call it 75 percent gross margin, becomes 10 to 15 percent net margin.” +
++Patrick Sullivan, who owns The Coffee House with his wife in downtown Burlington, Wisconsin, says he was “terrified” when they decided to hike their prices earlier this year. But they felt like they had no choice. They partner with Anodyne Coffee Roasting out of Milwaukee for their beans, which he credits for holding the line on pricing for a long time. Eventually, Anodyne — and other suppliers — gave in and hiked costs. “It was death, from a pricing perspective, by a thousand cuts,” he said. “Anodyne’s got to raise their bean cost 10 percent, our alternative milks went up 15 percent, so almond, oat, coconut.” Their supplier for regular milk upped prices, too, so Sullivan started going to the local Pick ’n Save, where it was cheaper, three times a week. Eventually, though, they had to start charging more. +
++“We basically made the decision in the spring of this year that we were going to do this in one fell swoop, and that way we know why we’re doing it, our employees know our reasoning and the numbers, and we just talk to our customers about it if they’re concerned,” Sullivan said. “The numbers had to be a 15 to 17 percent increase in price, that was just to maintain the profit margin that we have always needed, not to become more profitable.” +
++Danny McColgan, one of the owners of Familiars Coffee & Tea in Northampton, Massachusetts, said that over the past couple of years, it seemed like they were getting a letter from some vendor every month explaining a new price increase. “Even thinking back to when everyone was up in arms about how high the price of gas was getting, that was something where our vendors added fuel surcharges, and those fuel charges haven’t gone away,” he said. +
++Familiars, which opened in 2019, already had a higher price point. They work with a sustainability-focused coffee roaster that uses a direct trade model with farmers, and they get their milk from a local dairy farm that’s extra nice to its cows. “We’re paying a fair price for the coffee we’re using; we’re paying a fair price for the milk we’re using. And honestly, it’s not just paying a fair price, it’s paying a good price,” McColgan said. “It’s all about what people consider a commodity and what people consider a luxury. I think that in 2023, getting a vanilla oat milk latte is okay to be considered a luxury item. You can get a cup of black coffee for less.” +
++Baristas are making better money, and that money has to come from somewhere +
++Labor is often the most expensive cost coffee businesses have, and labor has gotten costlier over the past few years. Workers are demanding and making more money, and lower-wage workers — like baristas — have seen especially significant wage gains. That’s a good thing! It also means higher costs for companies, and — you guessed it — for you. +
++Starbucks has pointed to inflation and higher labor costs as the reason for its increased prices. (It’s also been able to make more money off of those higher prices.) +
++“There’s been a big push for them to have a better dynamic with their employees. So, they started a reinvention plan to kind of put an end to the unionization of employees, but it comes at a cost. So they’ve raised prices in that regard to raise wages,” said Siye Desta, an equity analyst at CFRA Research, a financial intelligence firm, referring to efforts among Starbucks employees to unionize stores. Starbucks’ reinvention plan also entails revamping some of its stores, it says, to improve the day-to-day of its workers and make things speedier and more efficient, which requires investment. +
++Starbucks has expanded digital tipping, which isn’t rolled up into the price of its drinks but obviously shows up for consumers at the point of sale. It has helped the company keep employees. “[It] might rub customers the wrong way, but it’s definitely helped with wages, and their barista attrition has improved quite a bit since they’ve made those changes,” Desta said. +
++There is quite a discourse around tipping right now, with many consumers feeling angered and pressured at point-of-sale tablets that nudge them to add on a tip for their barista or server. I will only say that you may want to keep in mind that your barista is making the cost of, like, two of your lattes an hour. Tip jars have always existed, they were just easier for consumers to ignore. Also, you can just tap “no tip.” +
++Smaller coffee shops are feeling wage pressure, too. Many states have laws in place that are gradually increasing the minimum wage, including Florida, Illinois, and Massachusetts. Many businesses have had to increase pay to compete for workers in the current labor market. +
++Sullivan, the Wisconsin coffee shop owner, said most job applicants he gets nowadays list their current wage as somewhere in the $15 range. “For the volume of business we do, it requires a lot of staff to provide good service, so that’s the balancing act,” he said. His shop has changed around some of its food offerings to try to diversify and up ticket sizes to mitigate some of the higher labor costs. +
++If you love frilly coffee, you might have to learn to love (or accept) the frilly price +
++The price of lattes has always been steep, even before this recent bout of high inflation. The same goes for cold brew coffee, which is pricier to make because it takes more coffee, more time, and different machinery. If you think your drink of choice is too expensive now, you probably thought it was expensive five years ago. The latte-sipping liberal meme exists for a reason, whether or not it’s fair. +
++The price of lattes probably isn’t going to go down anytime soon. As much as customers have been annoyed by the price hikes, they’ve kept buying and ordering fancier drinks. Plenty of big companies, including Starbucks, have been quite forthcoming about consumers continuing to open up their wallets to higher degrees. The small coffee shop owners I spoke with said that by and large their customers seemed to get what was going on with the pricing, though they did sometimes get complaints. Plus, if the big guys like Starbucks charge more, so can they. +
++Benoit, the Illinois coffee company owner, said he often argues that coffee is underpriced, given the length of its supply chain and the number of hands the product touches before the consumer has their first sip. “You can compare it to other things in the beverage industry. You look at wine, right?” he said. “It’s grown in far-away places, the manufacturing of the product is pretty intensive. Nobody blushes at a $10, $15 glass of wine at a restaurant, but somebody might see a $5 latte as expensive.” It’s not not a fair point, though $15 for a glass of wine is also wild. +
++If there’s a silver lining here for coffee lovers, it’s that prices are probably going to chill for a while now. “I think it’s more likely now than it was before for there to be some signs of consumers trading down with the orders and making less custom drinks that are expensive, which might change [Starbucks’s] pricing strategy,” Desta said. “They’ve already indicated they don’t plan on taking much compared to quarters past, and that’s just kind of industry-wide.” +
++The other silver lining is that, really, you do have other options — you can go somewhere cheaper, you can make your coffee at home. Or you can keep at it with the lattes, which are delicious, and if you’re going to local coffee shops, supporting small businesses. It’s just going to cost you a little more than you’d like. +
++McCarthy, Matt Gaetz, and the motion to vacate, explained. +
++Congress finally managed to squeeze out a deal to fund the government for 45 days on Saturday, but the eleventh-hour resolution is already causing trouble for Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy. +
++Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida indicated Sunday that he will call for a motion to vacate — a vote to toss McCarthy from leadership for passing a continuing resolution that Gaetz says violates the terms of McCarthy’s speakership deal. For the rest of the country, a fight over the speakership takes away from the work of passing a long-term funding deal, as well as negotiating the future of aid to Ukraine. +
++Gaetz has led the charge against McCarthy’s leadership since January, when Gaetz and a crew of right-wing holdouts refused to vote for McCarthy until he made major concessions to the group — including restoring the ability of any one member of the House of Representatives to call for McCarthy’s removal, among other promises. Now, the question for McCarthy — assuming the motion to vacate forges ahead — is whether he’ll be able to get the support he needs from Democrats to retain the speakership while also retaining the support of more moderate Republicans. +
++That may not be so simple, as McCarthy seems to frustrate different critical factions while trying to please everyone. While Congress has avoided a shutdown that was seen as all but inevitable until the legislation actually passed, some Democrats are frustrated about the lack of support for Ukraine written into that legislation, while Republicans — especially Gaetz’s right-wing group — are furious that their proposed funding cuts didn’t make it through to the final legislation. +
++That puts McCarthy in a tenuous position, potentially fighting for his job despite the fact that he averted a government shutdown. What’s more, proposing a motion to vacate distracts Congress from the crucial work of funding the government for the next year — something they have just six weeks to do before the continuing resolution runs out. +
++Here’s how McCarthy got into this situation +
++Back in January, McCarthy went through a grueling 15 rounds of votes to win his speakership. Because Republicans have such a narrow majority in the House — 221 Republicans to 212 Democrats — the defection of 19 extreme right-wing Republicans, including Gaetz, Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, and Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, represented a serious problem for McCarthy’s ambition to finally take the speaker’s gavel. To win over his naysayers, McCarthy ultimately agreed to a deal that left him vulnerable to an ouster, as Ben Jacobs wrote in January: +
++++Part of their demands include efforts to weaken the office of speaker generally and enable rank-and-file members of the House — and, in particular, rank-and-file members of the House GOP — to have more influence over legislation. In recent years, speakers from both parties have centralized more and more authority in their own hands. This has meant members have less opportunity to introduce amendments, that most key legislation is negotiated by leadership in both parties, and it is presented for a vote in a handful of comprehensive bills such as the 2022 social spending bill Democrats dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act. +
+
+Those who want McCarthy gone all dislike him for their own reasons, from the political to the personal. Gaetz has accused McCarthy of breaking his pledges to the right-wing group that ultimately delivered his speakership win, particularly surrounding the debt ceiling debate back in May. +
++Much like avoiding a government shutdown, passing legislation to avert a default on the US’s debts was critical for the economy and for the government’s ability to serve its function. But for Gaetz in particular, any effort McCarthy makes to work with Democrats seems to renege on the January bargain, as Politico pointed out. +
++“Speaker McCarthy made an agreement with House conservatives in January and since then he’s been in brazen, repeated material breach of that agreement,” Gaetz told CNN’s Jake Tapper on State of the Union Sunday. “This agreement that he made with Democrats to really blow past a lot of the spending guardrails we set up is a last straw.” +
++The stakes are high — both for McCarthy and for the government +
++Once the legislation passed the House on Saturday — mostly with Democratic support — Gaetz tried to get the floor, ostensibly to call for a motion to vacate, but was rebuffed. The motion to vacate will come this week, Gaetz has promised, and he could be counting on quite a bit of Democratic support, particularly in the Congressional Progressive Caucus, as Politico Playbook pointed out Sunday. But that’s far from a guarantee that McCarthy will lose the speakership, particularly if Jeffries doesn’t convince the entire Democratic caucus to vote against McCarthy. Furthermore, there are plenty of GOP members who would vote to keep McCarthy in power, denying Gaetz’s effort the majority it would need to remove McCarthy from office. +
++Gaetz has thus far remained mum as to who he sees as a viable replacement for McCarthy, particularly given that Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the second most powerful Republican in the House, is being treated for cancer. +
++“The problem is — and this is the same problem we saw with the 15 ballots at the beginning of the year — it is my belief that there is nobody at this point in time that has the majority votes in order to become speaker other than Kevin McCarthy,” Rep. Morgan Griffith, a Freedom Caucus member from Virginia, told Politico on Friday, though Majority Whip Tom Emmer’s name has been floated, the Washington Post reported Thursday. +
++But the stakes for the government are significant, too. Despite opposition from both the right and the left, McCarthy has managed to push through agreements on the debt ceiling and a continuing resolution, two significant challenges with serious, long-ranging national consequences. Those deals are far from perfect, but both seemed impossible until they were actually done. +
++Though 45 days may sound like plenty of time to pass a spending bill, it’s not, particularly given the major partisan divide over government spending. Most Republicans, and especially the hard-right Republicans like Gaetz, are demanding spending cuts across the board and much more stringent border controls, at odds with most Democrats. Anything that distracts from coming to an agreement over a full year of government funding increases risk of a shutdown come November 17, when the current deal expires. +
++As far as funding for Ukraine is concerned, most members of Congress support sustained aid and Senate leadership from both parties indicated Saturday that the Senate will work to protect that funding. Democrats, including Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, who held up the Senate vote on Saturday’s funding bill over Ukraine aid, maintain that support against Russia’s illegal invasion and occupation is critical to defend democracy against an authoritarian foe. +
++Whatever happens to McCarthy, he’ll likely continue to find himself beholden to interests other than his own, whether that comes from his own party or not. And even if he survives this motion, it’s possible, given Gaetz’s animosity and promises to take McCarthy down, that he’ll face another challenge sometime in the future. +
++
++
++Social media is our public diary — and it’s only getting more intimate. +
++Oversharing in conversation is nothing new. Throughout thousands of years of social interaction, people have divulged certain secrets, vulnerabilities, and desires to perhaps the wrong listener, with results ranging from mild embarrassment to shattered reputations. Thanks to social media, the ability to make these confessions to a potentially much wider audience is easier than ever. +
++What isn’t as straightforward is defining what constitutes oversharing online. Each platform has its specific norms and users who have their own opinions on what content they consider too cringe or vulnerable for public consumption. For instance, when people express negative emotions on Facebook, it doesn’t seem so out of place, according to a 2017 study. On the contrary, Instagram is where users expect to see positive content — albeit content that isn’t particularly authentic. One study, from 2021, suggests the norms on TikTok empower users to embrace both difficult and positive experiences when they post. +
++However, as social media continues to occupy an increasingly intimate space in our lives, as Ysabel Gerrard, a senior lecturer in digital communication at the University of Sheffield, thinks it will, what we post — and how audiences interpret it — will shift. Gerrard, who studies young people’s experiences of social media and digital identities, says that when social platforms become a place to store meaningful memories, the way we post will only become more personal. But does this give us permission to post through it? +
++This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. +
++On one hand, I see sharing details online of something difficult or frustrating as being cathartic. But what is too much? +
++The thing about any digital phenomenon is that everything has a pre-social media alternative. Loads of sociologists have talked about what is acceptable communication and conduct. But now, we’re re-asking those questions in relation to social media. What is actually new here and what has stayed the same from previous social norms? +
++There is something that is distinctive and new, which is that it really depends on what a person’s account is for. Social media has become so embedded in so many people’s lives — not everybody’s, obviously not everybody uses it — that people tend to do what Emily van der Nagel calls compartmentalizing your identity across different accounts on different platforms and sometimes across multiple accounts within the same platform. What might be an overshare on one account might feel completely different to your audience on another. For a lot of people, how you interpret an overshare is based on what you imagine that person’s account to be for, and that might conflict with what that person intends their account to be for. If you’re talking to someone face-to-face, you’re in that specific context. Those contextual cues are lost and dispersed when it comes to social media. +
++How much do the norms of each platform play into how much people are comfortable sharing? +
++That, to me, is the crux. There’s an article by Martin Gibbs and a few other authors about funerals and grief. But actually, that’s a vehicle for them to discuss what they call platform vernaculars, about how each platform is a really complex combination of policies, technologies, visual aesthetics, finance models — everything that combines to make a platform a platform. What they’re saying is each platform is so distinct that your identity manifests differently across each platform. You could have the same username and profile picture across all the same platforms but your behavior and your emotional connection to that platform, the people you speak to or the people you don’t speak to, is so fundamentally different across platforms. That’s why we often see this tension in how people interpret other people’s content. Is it an overshare? Is it not an overshare? +
++If I say to you, “Pick a post on a platform that you think is an overshare and show it to me.” If you surveyed X number of people with loads of different identity markers — age, gender, ethnicity, social class, religious background — I would be really shocked if you got consensus on that. It would be really tricky. +
++I recently saw a very vulnerable post on Instagram about a breakup and I remember thinking, “This feels like too much for Instagram.” But I think if I saw it on TikTok, it wouldn’t have felt so out of place. +
++How each of us goes into a specific platform not only shapes how you post and what you do there, but it shapes how you receive other people’s content. That person who shared that, maybe for them, their Instagram occupies a really, really intimate and personal place in their life, but yours doesn’t and that’s where you get that mismatch of expectations versus understanding. +
++I feel, in my own life and research, that social media is occupying an even more intimate role in our lives now. We’re using platforms that are really familiar to us, particularly Instagram, in way more intimate ways than we ever have — and there are quite a few trends to back that up, for instance, finstas and photo dumps. That’s all signposting us toward a place where the platform has a really intimate role in our lives, and perhaps that shapes what we share and therefore how people interpret that. +
++Could you elaborate more on how that intimacy manifests? +
++I wrote a piece for the Conversation about the photo dumps trend on Instagram. It got me looking back at literature on tangible photo albums: how people craft them, why they use them, how they interpret them. One of the things I realized was that the photo dump trend is showing us that we’re wanting to curate a set of photographs and reflect on important pieces of our lives — maybe it’s a holiday, maybe it’s a season, maybe it’s an event — instead of just putting that one powerful aesthetic picture. That has resonance with photo albums and how we would craft and carefully place photographs in tangible albums. That shift, to me, signifies that we’re using the platform more intimately, which means that we are using it more as a form of archival. It means that we have relationships on certain accounts with certain people that feel intimate, that feel like you’d want to share those moments of your life with. Instagram in particular is becoming more meaningful and a form of memory, and it may be suggested that we think it’s going to be around for a while if we’re willing to put these pieces of our histories in there. +
++We all are aware of the fact that there’s usually an audience when we’re posting in this public way. How does the way people interact with or potentially perceive us play into what we choose to share? +
++There’s an understanding that certain forms of intimacy will generate more clicks, more likes, more views, more virality. You do need to go into these things with a healthy degree of skepticism and think, “What was the motivation behind that?” There’s a lot of discourse around the weaponization of tears, especially in terms of race. There are forms of intimacy that are not innocent. +
++But to me, I think a good chunk of content out there is genuinely people who want to use social media as an outlet to express their emotions, to share stories from their lives. There are lots of stories where social media has saved people’s lives because people got access to communities where they feel seen and they feel heard and they can find people with common experiences. A lot of people wouldn’t admit this, but [maybe] they’ve created a throwaway account on Reddit, and they’ve gone on to a subreddit and they’ve shared the most harrowing, intimate personal details about their lives because they need help and they get that support. Because that’s in a really bounded context — in a subreddit, where it’s supposed to be — it’s not considered an overshare because the norms of that space dictate that it should be there. +
++When you’ve got something like Instagram or TikTok, it really depends on who you are and who uses the platform. You’ve got all these different audiences from different parts of your lives that have been collapsed into one: you’ve got your work colleagues, you’ve got your one-night stand, you’ve got your partner, you’ve got your partner’s family, you’ve got your parents. It’s really hard to post anything without someone somewhere having something to say about it, whether it was an overshare, inappropriate. That’s why subreddits and more niche spaces are so valuable and so powerful, and they’re not really the places where people get accused of oversharing. The places we accuse people of doing this on are your more mainstream, generalized platforms. +
++How can oversharing backfire? +
++There’s a very obvious way it can go wrong, which is when a person says something objectively harmful or hurtful and then it escalates from there. But to me, there are two main micro-ways that it can go wrong. One of the ways oversharing goes wrong is when you post something, and someone is in your audience who isn’t really the intended receiver and it backfires. Another way that it can go wrong is when you post to the wrong place. It’d be fair game on this platform, but not this platform. +
++So should we be posting through it? +
++I’ve done a lot of research into how people with, for example, depression and who have eating disorders are sharing, what they’re talking about, and how they’re using different platforms. I’ve tended to focus on people who do this anonymously. I’ve written a lot about how people conceal their identities in order to talk about these things, partly, for a lot of people, because they are stigmatized, and people don’t want their legal identity being linked to what are essentially their innermost thoughts on their health conditions. +
++On the flip side, you’ve got a lot of people who are putting their names and faces to lots of different things. I saw this TikTok the other day of this girl whose partner had died. She was sobbing and the first words that came out of her mouth were “I don’t know why I’m doing this.” I thought it was a really powerful sentence. We assume there’s so much craft and thought that goes into these moments. A word that gets bandied around a lot is “attention-seeking.” There’s a lot of disparagement of people who do that, but like I said, social media has become so intimate as part of our lives. It is probably getting to a point in society where it does feel more normal and more natural to talk about how you feel and post it. +
++There’s a really simple explanation where you can say it might benefit someone else who is going through that. There’s lots of evidence to suggest that is the case, that it’s helping to destigmatize certain things and that it’s been really helpful. But that, to me, is a simple explanation. What else is happening on top of that is that we are having, as a society, a very different level of intimacy toward social media that we might not be comfortable admitting at this stage. I don’t think it is as easy anymore to just say, “That’s an overshare,” or, “That’s cringe.” +