$7 Coffee: a Moment of Joy or a Frivolous Fail?

[canyonwalker]

Recently it's become a hot topic on social media whether buying a "$7 coffee" daily/most days of the week is a reasonable treat or a financial failing. This is kind of a repeat of canards like "avocado toast" and "$5 lattes" from past years. Of course now it's a $7 coffee instead of a $5 latte because of inflation.

The basic canard is that young people— and it's almost almost a tongue clucking criticism of younger adults— are destroying their financial futures by wasting their money on frivolous treats such as coffee, lattes, avocado toast, or whatever modern treat old fogies don't understand, when instead they could, and should, be saving that money toward important things like a down payment on buying a house, or retirement.

Although the social media shaming is a modern phenomenon, the underlying question of, "How much should one sacrifice today to save for tomorrow?" is not new. It's a question I asked myself long ago when I was starting out as an adult, years before there was social media and things like maligning avocado toast became memes.

Back then a common way to frame the question was around what to eat for lunch. Do you bring a bag lunch of a cheap sandwich, or do you go out to eat for lunch? A PB&J sandwich was the proxy for wisely saving for later; eating lunch out, even fast food, was the proxy for wastefully spending money today.

I made my own decision long ago that both halves of the question were simultaneously right and wrong. Yes, saving money for the future is right. But enjoying the present is right, too. And reducing the two to a dilemma— where only one is possible— is wrong. I would save some of my money to have nice things in the future while not forcing myself to live an overly austere life in the present. I would eat fast food lunches instead of brown-bagging PB&J sandwiches, because that brought me satisfaction in the present, and I would save for my own future. It was like I would have my cake and eat it, too.

So far it's worked for me.

Comments

[rimrunner]

I always wondered about the avocado toast--it's so oddly specific. A month or so ago I read a book, new in 2001, that was basically a bunch of dietary recommendations based on the outcomes of some longitudinal studies that had been recently published and formed much of the basis for the book. There's a lot of interesting stuff in there, including a major critique of the Food Pyramid as it existed at the time, but one curious nugget was the recommendation of avocado as a butter substitute.

I don't know if that's where the trope came from, or if it's that avocados are weirdly associated with California in people's minds and therefore sus to the rest of the country, or what. (Unless they're in guacamole, I guess.)

What I do know is that I started eating avocado toast recently and the prices of a pound of butter and an equivalent quantity of avocado are pretty comparable, at least around here.

[canyonwalker]

According to this Know Your Meme page avocado toast became a meme in 2017 after an Australian tycoon sneered in a TV interview that he was able to buy his first home and build his riches because he didn't waste his money on lavish things like "smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each." An Australian news article excerpted it, and it went viral.

I believe avocado toast as a thing actually to eat became popular in the US as a result of the meme going viral. I live in a part of the US where avocados grow natively and I regularly buy them at the store (after a friend stopped bringing me bags full of them from the tree in his back yard after he moved) and I'd never heard of avocado toast until 2017/2018 when this meme emerged.

It looks like one of those cases of "A name given in scorn and adopted in pride." Millennials, who were the targets of the sneering, figured they might as well try the dish— and they found it was tasty. Other quick searches I tried indicate that it has been a thing on brunch menus in Australia for a long time. That would explain why it was an Australian billionaire who mocked it and Australia where it first went viral.

[some_other_dave]

Well, that tree was something like 65 feet tall! Some years it produced so many that we literally couldn't figure out what to do with them all!

[some_other_dave]

I have read (and agree with) the notion that Millennials tend to favor purchasing experiences rather than objects. Particularly houses, as those are so absurdly expensive in most areas that no realistic amount of saving can get you one.

There's a degree of both realism and hopelessness in that way of thinking.

[canyonwalker]

I'm familiar with that headline and I agree it represents both realism and (sadly) hopelessness. I don't take the headline claim fully at face value, though. It became popular in both social media and traditional media 8-10 years ago to bash Millennials for not having the fiscal values of older generations. Partly that's the "Kids these days" complaints that every generation seems to have about the one(s) following it. And partly also it got co-opted by political movements. The MAGA right caters to its mostly-older base by portraying younger people, especially cosmopolitan younger people with some discretionary income— people who tend to be politically liberal— as alien and foolish.