Good old bean water. By putting a fancy image on the cup and adding 56 grams of sugar, companies like Starbucks could charge well over $2 for a cup of bean water. People don't think they're buying coffee. They think they're buying status and inclusion in a trend. I remember in business school our retail marketing professor explained the margin as accounted for by the fact people are purchasing a social experience. On the one hand, I think that is absolutely true. On the other, it strikes me as such patent nonsense. At the end of the day, though, it all counts on our retardation. People are generally very fucking stupid. Here is what's interesting to me: the commonest way of talking about this would go something like, "If you spend $2.50 every morning for a cup of coffee from the gas station, that's $50 dollars a month. You could get a bucket of grounds for $12 and take your own coffee in a thermos." In other words, we get these 'a penny saved' kind of arguments. Typically, these kinds of arguments are promulgated by the upper class to give the lower class the broad impression that the upper class got where they were as a result of prudence, wisdom and discipline financially. For a legitimately wealthy person, the savings just aren't worth it. It is smarter for them to buy the expensive coffee because their time is worth more than a poor person's. The real problem we have in society is people unwilling to accept the class structure of our society, or that other people's time is not just nominally worth more, but objectively worth more. That's a tough pill to swallow for the modern mind. Everybody consumes at this sort of equilibrium level that is determined irrationally by their desire to appear higher status than they are. We are attracted to waste, rather, to people who can waste. It's metaphysical. High power generates high waste products, so societies naturally form around the rich, whose huge flows of cash actually demand they generate waste - because the waste is (in a strange circular way) part of what increased the value of their time. The rest of society is spending to be like those people. Our society counts on us not acting in our own objective best interests, but wanting to convey something by our spending.