Here’s jeers to the $6 cafe latte (from a coffee philistine)

2 months ago 4

Six dollars is break-even now. For a cup of coffee, that is. For the cafe owner. That’s what the woman told her workmates, at a table I was reading at, outside their offices. A man at the table asked if she was sure that wasn’t just something cafe owners said to justify their prices. He pointed out that when he makes a coffee at home it costs him next to nothing.

“Yeah,” she said, “but you’re not paying yourself to make it, and you don’t have a coffee-machine mortgage.”

He reminded her he has a mortgage on a house. I missed a chunk of the exchange. When I tuned in again, a woman was saying, “It’s no different to celery. If it was celery that cost that much, we’d be debating about celery.” Another, who until then had been neutral, pointed out that she never used to eat celery before she had kids but now it’s her go-to snack, with dip. Someone suggested she try peanut butter.

Coffee – more than celery ever dared pipe-dream – is unambiguously winning at life in Australia. Each Sunday I pass a place that appears to be little more than a portal in a wall. Never fewer than 20 citizens are queued there. People will park and lock the SUV, look both ways, cross and cheerily join the column. Can one cup of coffee be so much better than all others?

Being a coffee philistine, I wouldn’t know. Years ago I was training somebody at the place I work.
Somehow we got talking about coffee. I confessed to buying my takeaway from a certain ubiquitous
convenience store. He responded, with not nearly enough irony, “Well, I won’t be talking to you very
much from now on, then.”

Thing is, I don’t think I even tried hot coffee until I was maybe 20. Tea was always the thing. Mum tells me she and Dad drank coffee every so often but I just don’t remember it.

I do remember the first person my own age with a coffee habit. At 13, on the way to the bus stop each morning, I’d stop in for my friend Danny. His mum would be in her white terry-towel gown, shrouded in blue smoke, sipping coffee. He, too, was into the muddy beverage. He’d even dip his toast – peanut butter, if you please – for extra flavour.

The bean comes for us all, toys with us all, eventually convincing us we’re lacking without it.

Lately, to save a few sad coins, I’ve been trying those sachets – the kind packaged in a box, permanently half price in supermarkets. The convenience store I kicked is keen to reconnect, via electronic dispatches. Don’t forget it’s your birthday, James! And don’t miss out on raspberry white chocolate muffins, half-price with any drink purchase!

In Booze Built Australia, Wayne Kelly writes how, in the late 1860s, coffee became the new craze: “In order to lure drinkers from the pubs with their counter lunches, the coffee palaces placed enormous emphasis on food.”

Palace doors flung open at 7am. Wowsers saw their big chance and proclaimed coffee the new alcohol. They even built their own specialised palaces – caffeinated temperance hotels, basically, with better sandwiches.

Invincible alcohol prevailed. Its lures were one too many and its disciples true. “A cynic of the time,” Kelly writes, “stated that the only reason coffee palaces were popular in the first place was because drinkers used coffee as the new wonder drug to cure the hangover.”

Now, coffee soars. And if alcohol ever loses its grip, wowsers’ rust-encrusted graves may yet shake from unearthly laughter beneath.

Years ago I worked in America and noticed a no-frills approach to coffee. Nobody thought it had to taste like a wheat field at dawn, or Cleopatra’s pillow sweat.

Which brings me, tardily, to Commonfolk. That’s a cafe, not a class of people or coffee drinker. First Prize for Victoria’s Best Cafe in 2025 went to this cafe in Frankston, a suburb better known for a bustling courthouse than cafe culture.

Commonfolk is on a busy corner, right next door to the late MP Peta Murphy’s office. The large coffee is $6.90 and delicious. Behind me a child is having a meltdown because he prefers the cafe down the road (Frankie’s), where the cookies suit him better.

James Hughes is a freelance writer.