In my eternal quest to avoid being in my house and shirk all responsibilities, I made my way to a cafe in one of those little satellite cities orbiting Washington D.C. With a name reminiscent of counting, For Five Coffee Roasters sat in the middle of the block. Its sleek, minimalist facade was almost lost in the deluge of sleek, minimalist facades surrounding it1. If someone held a gun to my head and told me to imagine a new coffee shop in a well-off neighborhood2, I would have imagined the exact interior of this place. I walked in and I was immediately hit with that “21st-century nouveau riche minimalist woodsy metallic I’m not wealthy who are you calling wealthy? How dare you! But yes I am extremely wealthy” look and feel. Everything was sleek, but it was that chunky kind of sleek that so many of us middle-classers are passing off as “aesthetic”. You know exactly what I’m talking about. There was black metal everywhere but there were also plants hanging from the ceiling. There were floating shelves on the wall behind the counter, filled with various lavish decorative pieces. There were little smooth amorphous sculptures, and vases with dried plant matter sticking out of them. The kinds of things you would see on the wall of a living of a white, suburbanite, upper-middle-class family. There was a slab of polished wood that divided you from the employees. It was that very familiar look of an abandoned warehouse that was repurposed into a greenhouse/coffeehouse. I call it a waregreencoffeehouse. These are ubiquitous on the west coast. And, of course, there was house music layered over the mild din of the cafegoers.
After a moment or two, it was my turn to order. I was left alone facing a staff of baristas who were so undisturbed by approaching customers they might have been art fixtures. When I got someone’s attention, I asked for one of the blueberry muffins I saw in the glass pastry case. Little did I know, this would be one of the biggest mistakes of my already mistake-ridden life. The lady placed my blueberry muffin into a paper bag, not unlike how one might toss the corpse into a body bag. She placed the muffin on the counter in front of me next to the register and then proclaimed like it was normal to do so, “Seven dollars and thirteen cents please.” I metaphorically shit myself. Eight dollars for a blueberry muffin3? At that moment the universe imploded. It collapsed in on itself like an empty beer can at the bottom of the ocean. I was falling. I was falling and spinning down into a deep dark hole that now existed in a place where there was once logic and reason. I could not do anything other than take out my credit card and complete the transaction. My arm was moving like the arm of a reluctant Tin Man. “Thanks,” I said, but I don’t know why. What was I thankful for? Being put over the proverbial barrel and taken to proverbial pound town? I felt violated. I got shaken down by a blueberry-laden baked good. I had egg on my face, and that egg was a blueberry muffin.
I took my little paper bag with my blueberry muffin in it and searched for a place to sit. I was looking around, but I could not see. I was blinded by rage and confusion. I shuffled to a sleek black couch. I was still stupified by the price, so I was moving like Frankenstein’s monster on Xanax. I sat down and placed my expensive muffin on the sleek black table. Numbers swirled in my head. Prices of raw materials, rent, employee wages, overhead, profit margins, etc. I settled on the price of flour. It must be the price of flour. Muffins have flour in them. The flour is expensive. Therefore the muffin is expensive. I pulled out my laptop and quickly googled the price of flour. Three dollars and ninety-nine cents for a five-pound bag on Amazon. Okay, this makes sense now. They must use 5 pounds of flour per muffin.
I took a bite of my eight-dollar muffin4. As I pulverized the expensive blueberry muffin with my molars, I looked around. There were some tech bros to my right. I could tell they were tech bros because they were all huddled around one guy’s laptop staring at his screen while he typed. And they were saying words like “computer”, “code”, “tech”, and “bros”. In front of me were some influencer-looking people; looking freshly curated without a speck or spot out of place and a look on their faces like they were the most important people in the room while simultaneously having no idea what room they were in. Proud and lost. I started to notice everyone’s laptops. Every single person had a Macbook. Imagine how embarrassing it would be to pull out a Dell. You would almost be able to smell a computer so cheap among the superior Macbooks. I looked down at my own Macbook with a sense of relief.
Maybe it was the blueberries. I googled the price of blueberries. According to Google’s omniscient AI, the average price per pound of fresh blueberries was four dollars and eighty-seven cents in 2022. I looked at my muffin with a bite taken out of it. I’m not a scale, but if I had to guess I would say there was not a pound of blueberries in there. Maybe these blueberries were different. Maybe they were special; a rare breed of blueberries meticulously developed to be the best-tasting blueberry on the face of the earth. I took another bite to test this hypothesis. Inconclusive. I googled “best blueberries in world”. I was directed to a Guardian article about a culinary festival in Belgium. Some assholes tasted all sorts of foods and declared which food tasted good and which food was literal garbage, and if anyone ate the garbage they were to be sneered at. Among the foods that they tasted were blueberries. These were special blueberries from NSW5 Australia. For Five Coffee Roasters must have used those blueberries from down under in this here muffin.
As I continued taking expensive bites of this overpriced muffin, something that I could not stop thinking about was the idea that this stupidly expensive muffin was not made here in this building. After exhaustive research6, I found out that For Five Coffee Roasters is a national chain. That means there is a non-zero chance that this blueberry muffin, which costs eight US dollars, was produced in some far-away facility, and not by the hands that gave it to me in a paper bag.
I looked at the pile of crumbs where my muffin used to be. I thought about my place in the complex web we call “The Economy”. I am a consumer. I consumed a muffin. I consumed a blueberry muffin that cost me seven dollars and thirteen cents7. I thought of the man, woman, or large language model that created For Five Coffee Roasters. I thought of them sitting at a massive wooden desk with ornate carvings etched into it. They were laughing with a cigar in their mouth and a fistful of cash. There were stacks of cash all over the desk. Why were they laughing? Their secretary just buzzed in8 and told them that some stupid sucker just bought one of the eight-dollar muffins. I was the sucker. The consumer. All I do is consume.
Then, as I stared deeply into the muffin crumbs on the sleek black table, I thought about producing. I thought about buying all the ingredients, mixing the batter, waiting for the muffins to bake, and then waiting for them to cool. There’s no way I could do all that. So for now I’ll keep consuming. I’ll just be a pitiful consumer feeding the beast. And while I consume I want to make sure I’m doing it somewhere where there are no poors9 around. And the place needs to be nice and clean and fill me with a sense that I am stylish, modern, and free-thinking, but also politely restrained. I looked around at the well-off people sitting in this contemporary and extortionate waregreencoffeehouse. This place will do.
Footnotes
- This neighborhood is relatively new; therefore, every building looked like a poor attempt at Mies’ style. ↩︎
- Maybe they are an entrepreneur who loves coffee and wants to open up a cafe in an expensive part of town, but they just do not have the creative wherewithal to come up with a design for the place. So, after spending all of their cash, taking out a second mortgage on their house, and having been left by their spouse and dog, they take to the streets armed with a gun and a purpose. ↩︎
- It’s pretty much eight dollars. It might as well be eight dollars. It felt like eight dollars. Allow me to exaggerate the price here to drive home the point that this muffin was expensive as fuck. ↩︎
- How much did that bite cost me? How many hours of labor did it take to cover the cost of that bite? ↩︎
- This is not an abbreviation for North South West. ↩︎
- I read some stuff on their About page. ↩︎
- Once again, that’s pretty much eight dollars. ↩︎
- Do secretaries still buzz in? I don’t know. I wouldn’t know. ↩︎
- Smelly people who can’t afford Lululemon. ↩︎