Skip to main content

In praise of the costly cuppa

Image
By

Do you think your latte is a lotta money? Or your cappuccino needs a price cap?

Spare a thought for Boston Tea Party (BTP), an independent coffee chain, who voluntarily banned single use cups last year. It was an expensive decision – to the tune of £250,000.

From June 2018, the chain’s 22 stores decided to put planet before profit, and told their customers they had to bring a reusable cup, pay a deposit on one that they could return, or drink their hot beverage of choice in the branch.
v A bold decision and one that has proven costly. Owner Sam Roberts realised this would happen, and included the loss in his plans. With normal annual sales of £1m worth of takeaway coffees, a 25% drop is a big hit for a relatively small organisation.

Finding that offering 25p off for customers with their own reusable cup didn’t really work (just 5% showed up with cup), BTP decided to really go for it. Roberts has challenged the bigger chains to follow-suit, saying “We felt this was a financial loss we had to take and we want this to be a call to action to other companies”.

According to BTP, their decision has stopped 125,000 cups going in to landfill, as the paper and plastic lining are too difficult to recycle. It’s a great result, but when you consider that 2.5billion cups are just thrown away every year, with only a paltry 0.25% recycled, you can see the scale of the problem – it’s a drop in the already very polluted ocean.

The idea that a “latte levy” would be introduced in last Autumn’s budget was dropped, with ministers opting to leave it to stores to offer a discount if customers bring their own cup. Going on BTP’s experience, that has very little effect.

As a video accompanying a report on BTP’s actions on the BBC News website depressingly revealed, a lot of people really don’t care. One of the interviewees declared it to be a good scheme, but didn’t do it “because I just can’t be bothered with a reusable cup and washing it up myself.”

How depressing. Can you imagine the big chains voluntarily losing 25% of their frothy coffee earnings to help save the environment? Maybe it’s time that we were compelled to do this, rather than politely asked if we wouldn’t mind.

Many of us already bring our own bags to supermarkets. Should cups for coffee be next?

This post first appeared as my 'A wry look at the week' column, in The Mail, on Friday the 5th of April 2019. Both the print version, and the one used on their website, changed the title to "Does your coffee need a price cap?"

 Apologies for the delay in posting - I was on holiday last week, which also meant I took the rare decision to notify the paper that I wouldn't be submitting a column for the 12th of April. Back to normal for next week. For now...

 (Tape time: No 140, from 1986 and including ELO's "Balance Of Power" album.)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Making an exhibition of yourself

By
Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Schaf Shuffle

By
The weather – source of endless fascination, conversation, irritation and (just recently) excess irrigation. And a fidgety weather presenter on the BBC... I’m endlessly fascinated with the weather, and will confess to making sure I catch the BBC’s updates whenever possible. Not the local ones, where half the presenters look like they got dressed in the dark, or ITV, where they seem to know very little about actual weather, but the national forecasts. Delivered by actual Met Office personnel, their job entails a tricky mix of waving your hands about a bit, explaining about warm fronts without smirking, and trying not to look too pleased whilst mentioning gales force winds and torrential rain. Or stand in front of Cornwall. Each has their own presenting style, but there is one who intrigues me above all the others. Step forward, Tomasz Schafernaker, the 37 year old man from the Met who breezed onto our screens in 2001, as the youngest male ever to point out that it was going to r...
Post a Comment
Read more

RIP Jenwis Hamilbutton

By
We are gathered here in this... (looks round a bit) um... blog, to mourn the passing of Jenwis Hamilbutton. His life may have been short and largely irrelevant, but he touched the lives of so many people that... sorry? Oh. Apparently that was someone else... Jenwis Hamilbutton rose briefly to fame on twitter during 2010, when he was retweeted by BBC F1 presenter Jake Humphrey, having criticised his shirt. A similarly unspectacular claim to fame occurred when a tweet he crafted at 1am on a windy night appeared in F1 Racing magazine. An amalgam of bits of Formula 1 drivers Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button (mostly the hopeless bits), he came into existence via 3 pints of cider, a Creme Egg and the Electric Light Orchestra’s mournful 1986 farewell album “Balance Of Power”, played loudly over headphones. In his short existence, he was followed on twitter by Paul Hardcastle of “19” fame, and a bunch of slightly odd but jolly nice people, whom he was never entirely sure actually exist...
Post a Comment
Read more