 I love coffee, but I can't afford high street coffee anymore. In contrast, the media's obsession with coffee and its cost has become emblematic of the affluent middle class lifestyle of the media itself, akin to its origins in the coffee shop culture of 370 years ago in the 17th century. Today, coffee shops can tell us more about modern society than just retail trends. They're an indicator of how the modern neoliberal system operates and its current shift towards new economic extremes. In the 1990s, the economics of coffee retail in shifted. New coffee shops sprang up with industrial coffee machines, staffed by semi-skilled workers that could pump out exotic coffees on demand. Choice became a cult selling point, a narcissism of small differences to the point where ordering a round of coffees became a memory test challenge. In this video, I'm going to update some work I did pre-pandemic to look at how the modern obsession with coffee reflects the deeper dominant ideology of our times. The modern cult of coffee and its place in an increasingly unequal, polarised world and its use of food culture as a measure of acceptable affluence needs to be exposed. I know it's fashionable to use the metric of McDonald's stores, approximately 1300, versus food banks, more than 2500. Why not compare food banks to the number of Greggs, roughly 2200, given that those shops are more ubiquitous in high streets and shopping centres? In practice, both Greggs and McDonald's sell basic, low-cost, hence low-quality food that is affordable to most people. From the perspective of food inequality, coffee shops are a critical choice because they sell a culturally refined, artificially inflated product outside the price range of many people. Again, highlighting the media's myopia over the growing underclass divide in society. In 2021, there were over 9500 branded coffee chain outlets. Collectively, the major chains turned over £4.4 billion in 2021, recovering most of their pandemic losses. Even though, as a result of various factors, the prices for coffee are now in the range of £3 to £4 a cup. Office financial statistics data shows that in 2021, the richest 10% spent twice as much on food and non-alcoholic drinks as the poorest 10%, reflecting the higher price paid per item, not simply the excess volume consumed. Recently, the Trussell Trust announced a rise of 14% in the number of food parcels given out compared to before the pandemic, 2.1 million per year, or one every 13 seconds. Across the population, 1 in 6 are now using food banks. FairShare, a larger organisation collecting rejected food to distribute to community based social projects, supplied 132 million meals for the year up to March 2021. In the year up to March 2022, it grew even further, and they were moving 4 meals every second. OK, that's a lot of statistics. What has grown food bank use got to do with posh coffee shops? Coffee shops represent nearly all values in action. Concentrated ownership, free chains, costas, Starbucks and Cafe Nero make up half of all outlets. Transnational exploitation, the system reduces tax liabilities by moving income offshore. And outsourcing liabilities, most shops are franchises operating under feudal contract management and supply. Sorry to butt in with a quick advert, but if you'd like to see more content like this then you really should consider liking this video, subscribing to my YouTube channel, perhaps leaving a comment below and following me on social media. In today's digital analytics popularity contest, all that button pressing means something in this messed up world, and if we're going to challenge that, then we have to do our bit to whack the algorithms, supporting the kind of content we want to see by clicking on it. The popular debate over the price of a cup of coffee has become an exercise in virtue signaling. It has little to do with the politics and economics at the root of the issue. The price of a cup of coffee shows how near liberal economics dominate society and how that economic debate steers towards certain consumer issues and away from the structural inequality it creates within national economies. If you look at the corporate structures surrounding expensive coffee shops, they reflect the deepest values of neoliberalism, of unfair trade practices both nationally and globally, authoritarian practices in the operation of those businesses, such as offshoring or their opposition to unionization, and by extension pushing those values out into the wider world through unfair contracting, franchising and political lobbying practices. Britain has some of the most concentrated long-term land ownership in the world. Much of it is rural, but a significant concentration exists within certain urban land uses, predominantly housing and retail property. Figures from the British Property Federation for 2017 show that just over half of commercial property in Britain is owned by investment companies, and of that £486 billion of investment property, almost a third, £183 billion, is owned by offshore investment companies. To date, much of the debate about overpriced coffee has related to the money that the coffee growers receive, usually less than 1%. This is clearly an important issue about exploitation and trade. The problem is in mistricting the debate to the exploitation of poor farmers, or the ethical performance of retail chains on issues like single-use waste, it ignores where most of the money is going, and how that reinforces inequality and poverty in Britain, too. That means it's not just the profits from selling the coffee itself that are spirited away, offshore, by some of the leading coffee chains. The profits from the properties they operate within are just as likely to be sent offshore, untaxed, through the operation of physical or intellectual property-holding companies in tax havens. And while the media occasionally mention the 10%, roughly £35, of the price that may be going offshore from the coffee chain, they do not mention the up to one-third, a pound or more, that might be offshored from the retail property owner. Early economists were pretty scathing of rent-seeking activity in the economy. It levers a charge on the economy to use assets, while often doing little to create new economic value in return for that unearned wealth. The offshoring of profits from trade make that drag on the national economy even worse. How can you expect to defeat these practices when those same principles are at work in our daily life? The price of a cup of coffee is emblematic because it normalises practices such as explosive franchising contracts, the zero-hours employment culture, and the oligopoly of corporations who control retail property and the explosive international commodity trading system. Expensive coffee from coffee chains internalises the core value of neoliberalism, through the direct exploitation of workers in the supply chain, more widely, through the social effects of their low-pay, tax-avoiding business creating poverty across the nation, and the political culture normalised by these practices. It is that culture which took hold in Britain 40 years ago, which has directly created food poverty and the rising demand for food banks. The simple alternative to shop-bought coffee is to do it yourself. This creates a problem. Coffee doesn't grow on trees. Well, not in temperate climates anyway. It's really difficult to buy raw beans and roast them yourself, that market is almost exclusively a commercial one, and the mechanics of trying to import your own beans direct from growers without paying a fortune in transport costs, tangles you in the stark reality of how unfair free trade really is. For those who like their drugs to be ethical, that usually adds around 20% to the cost of the beans already ground bags. Even then, there are issues over how fair fair trade is, as the processing and packaging plant is usually not based on the country of origin, meaning that most of the surplus value doesn't flow to the producing nation. Buying ready roasted whole beans saves a small amount of money, usually no more than 15 to 25%. Again though, often there is no saving, as it's a market directed towards people with expensive coffee machines or who obsessively grind their own. It also assumes that you have the ability to easily grind them yourself. Though the positive aspect of grind it yourself is that the beans give more of a flavourful hit, as the volatile oils do not evaporate as easily from the beans as they do from the ready ground coffee. For the average person though, buying ready ground coffee is going to be the simplest option. Here the market is standardised around roughly £0.25 or 227g bags. The only practical option for bulk buying is to wait for a special offer in the supermarket then buy a huge amount in a single purchase. Stockpile in the bags until the next special offer comes along. Even the relatively more expensive bag option shows just how much money is extracted from the public for coffee shops when we do the sums. A good quality fair trade coffee retails at something like £4.50 a bag. I use about 35g of coffee for each litre I brew, which will cost 63 pence. Adding 15 pence for the energy and water used to make coffee and wash up, the cost of a litre of coffee is around 78 pence. An average 350ml cup of coffee from a chain shop retails of £3-4. Let's call that £3.50. Divide 1000ml by 350 to get the number of cups per litre, then multiply by the cost of a cup, and you're paying £10 per litre for chain shop coffee. In summary then, shop bought coffee is 12 times more expensive than you might reasonably pay for a good DIY brew. If you were to buy a half or 1 litre stainless steel firmoss and carry it with you, you'll pay for the flask with the money saved the second time you filled it. I know, all you desperately need is coffee, so that you can minimally function in this mad mad world. I too can empathise with that. So why am I trying to complicate your caffeine habit with insights into near liberal economics? Apart from Tory MPs, it's difficult to think of anyone who thinks food banks are a good idea. Yes, they're objectively good, compared to allowing 3 million people to starve, but the fact is they shouldn't need to exist in a country as rich as ours. The reason they do exist is because of the economic dogma that all major political parties worship, and how that has progressively impoverished people across Britain. If you want to break that, then you have to act, and a cost-effective way to exclude the most rapacious business practices which extort money from the public is to boycott the expensive chain coffee shops. This trade is unfair not just because of the exploitation of the coffee growers. Both the purchaser and the farmer are being conned by that same neoliberal economic system, and unless you recognise that, you won't change it. Right now, led by Britain and the US, the rightward shift in national politics, assisted by the economic disruption wrought by the libertarian billionaires of Silicon Valley, is driving a new wave of extreme neoliberal economics. Some actually label this neo-feudalism due to the level of economic power taken from the average person and given to corporations and billionaires. This new authoritarian neoliberalism is not a departure from the policies of Reagan and Thatcher 40 years ago. It's actually more in line with the pure neoliberal theory that was first dreamt of by right-wing think tanks in the 60s and 70s. Though its political supporters rhetorically speak of free markets, instead this new right-wing orthodoxy seeks to real-guide society in a coercive, non-democratic and unequal way. From cutting red tape to removing protest rights, this is the goal of the political right. The true economic divide is not between consumers in the developed world and poor farmers in the developing world. The divide is between those who must work, coffee shop owners included, and those who take unearned profits from the assets which should be cooperatively owned by society. Households are central to the resistance to neoliberalism, and to the neoliberal worldview in general. Resistance doesn't begin by throwing bricks, it begins when you refuse to live as directed by this economic scowl. To make a start, just breathe your own coffee. After that, everything else is negotiable.