Starbucks and retirement

I was at D.C.’s Reagan airport early in the morning a couple weeks ago and stopped to get a cup of coffee at the airport Starbucks. Now, before I get a bunch of crap for either hating on Starbucks or for buying Starbucks, let me clear up a few things…

First, I do buy Starbucks. As far as quick coffee choices go, its the best option out there. Tim Hortons is pretty much horrible on all fronts. From their cardboard breakfast sandwiches to their burnt dishwater coffee-like beverage, they excel at nothing. Oh, and if you fancy some onset adult diabetes, get one of their Iced Capps, which would send a hummingbird into cardiac arrest. McDonalds coffee isn’t good either, but at least the price tag is commensurate with the expectation. It’s kind of like the gas station coffee you get when you fill up. You aren’t sure who made it or how long it’s been sitting there, but you can get a gallon of it for a nickel as long as you are a part of the gas station rewards club.

Second, I’m a conundrum of a client for Starbucks. I buy it, and I like it, but I’m angry about it. It bothers me that Starbucks has pretty much pilfered Italian sizing terms and used them to promote a coffee shop started in a state that is as far as you can get away from Italy while still being in the U.S. (Hey geography nerds, I know Hawaii and Alaska are farther away from Italy than Washington. I’m not counting those two states, so shut up.) The story is that Howard Schultz visited Italy and loved the coffee bars so much he wanted to introduce the terms into his business. Fine. But what has happened now is that he has trained an entire generation of baristas to only recognize those pretentious terms. What I find funny about this is that you can’t go in and order a “medium” anything, because the medium size is called “grande,” which actually means large… even though it is the medium size of the three sizes you can order… In a nutshell, Starbucks has successfully forced society in general to adopt a different language when ordering coffee, in a completely different sizing standard than I learned as a kid. Bravo.

The third and final thing ties back in to the first sentence, before I took a side trip down rant lane. Airport pricing. I had this moment when I was getting coffee at the airport where I was amazed that the price for a cup of coffee at Starbucks wasn’t any more expensive than it is anywhere else. Everyone who has ever been to an airport has said or thought, “Boy if these people had any idea how much this bag of M&Ms cost in the real world, they would feel like criminals.” I mean, I had a headache that evening and willingly paid 8.99 for some Advil , and that was only because beer (the other painkiller) was 13.99. After being briefly happy that the price of a cup of coffee wasn’t inflated, it hit me. Starbucks has applied an airport pricing structure to their entire business model, making an airport markup completely unnecessary. They have successfully implemented a pricing structure that has created the feeling of joy when you go to an airport and pay a non-marked up $4.95 for a coffee you had to order in another language.

To wrap up the financial portion of this hypocritical b*tch-fest, here is a funny thought about coffee and your retirement…

I run numbers pretty much constantly. As a Dave Ramsey Master Financial Coach, I frequent Dave’s website to use his investment calculator and mortgage payoff calculator. At the bottom of his investment calculator page, it lists several small things you could give up to make a huge difference in your financial future. One of the suggestions is to give up your daily cup of drive-thru coffee. He lists the savings per month at $128.

Even Dave Ramsey, the king of “Live like no one else now, so you can live and give like no one else later,” assumes a cup of coffee will cost you 4.25 PER DAY!!! Congratulations, Starbucks! You have desensitized an entire population of people to paying a silly amount of money for a cup of coffee.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, a $4.25 cup of coffee invested per day starting at age 30 will get you to about $267,000.00 by the time you are 67.

Put a different way, that $56,000.00 lifetime Starbucks contribution could land you almost 5 times that amount in retirement. Put that in your red-eye soy-milk caramel macchiato pipe and smoke it.

Afterthought… Again, I like Starbucks, and will likely die a little poorer for not foregoing my couple of trips per week to that corporate caffeine addiction distributor.

This time of year, I enjoy the peppermint mocha that might be the only reason Starbucks exists. I even have Starbucks peppermint mocha creamer at my house, and when I offered it to my sister when she was visiting, she said, “No thanks, I’m not 10 years old.” She will likely be the topic of future posts…

Anyway, twice in the past two weeks I have been out getting supplies for the shop and have thought, “You know what would brighten my day? A peppermint mocha.” Both times, they have been out of peppermint. What in the ever-loving h*ll, Starbucks? It’s Christmas time. In my mind, you have two jobs. Peppermint mocha, served by someone that would never be able to decipher that I mean “Grande” when I say “Medium”.

I’ll bet it smells amazing for a square mile around a Starbucks that inexplicably is set on fire…