Prices Increase In The Cafe

It’s that time of year again. Prices are going up at Bond Street Coffee.

Normally, we review our prices around the same time that we increase staff wages. We pay in line with the Brighton & Hove Living Wage, so when that goes up, usually around April, it has always seemed like a logical point to look at everything else.

The cost of running the café goes up. We pay our staff more. Eventually, the prices on the menu have to follow.

Except this year I kept putting it off.

Partly because we were already charging £4 for a flat white, and £4 for a coffee still feels like quite a lot of money to me.

Maybe I’m just getting old. I remember when a cappuccino hitting £2 felt expensive.

But we’ve held off for as long as we reasonably can, so from this week we’re adding 20p to our coffee prices.

How we price coffee at Bond Street

We have a slightly unusual pricing system at Bond Street, although to me it has always seemed incredibly logical.

Rather than giving every drink on the menu a different price, we essentially have two prices.

There’s a price for black coffee: espresso, long black, Americano.

Then there’s a price for coffee with steamed milk, which is 40p extra: cortado, flat white, cappuccino, latte.

I’ve always found it slightly strange that cafés charge different amounts depending on how much hot water goes into a cup.

The expensive bit is the espresso.

Yes, technically there’s a cost involved in heating water, but the espresso machine is already on and the water is already hot. Does pouring some extra hot water into someone’s cup really make an Americano worth 30p or 40p more than an espresso?

It never made much sense to me.

Milk is slightly different, but even there the difference between drinks isn't as big as it might appear.

You can’t really steam 30ml of milk perfectly for one tiny drink. Whether I’m making a cortado or a flat white, I still need to pour milk into a jug, steam it, pour the drink and inevitably have a little left over.

So just because you’re drinking less of that milk, have I actually done less work or used dramatically less product?

Not really.

That’s why we keep the pricing simple.

The downside is that our smaller drinks can look expensive compared with cafés that price every drink individually. Our espresso might look expensive next to someone else’s £3 espresso, but our Americano costs exactly the same. You’re paying for the coffee and the work that goes into making it, rather than the amount of water in the cup.

What should a speciality coffee actually cost?

This is the bit I’ve been thinking about a lot recently.

There’s a strange situation with speciality coffee where the price we can charge is still heavily influenced by what every other café around us is charging.

When I was looking at our prices, I checked some of the big chains nearby.

A flat white at one of them was around £4.15, with roughly another 45p for oat milk.

That’s getting towards £4.60 for an oat flat white from a huge coffee chain.

And it made me question why I felt so uncomfortable about our own prices.

We’re an independent speciality coffee shop.

The coffee we buy costs more. We use interesting, traceable single origin coffees. We pay our staff properly. We put a lot of time into training, dialling in coffee and trying to make every drink taste as good as it can.

Surely that should be worth more than a coffee from a massive chain?

Yet somehow I still find myself looking at their prices and thinking we need to compete with them.

It’s a slightly ridiculous comparison when you think about it.

So, yes, prices are going up

From this week, we’re adding 20p to our coffee prices.

That means our black coffees will now be £3.80, and drinks with steamed dairy milk, including flat whites, cappuccinos and lattes, will be £4.20.

Does £4.20 for a flat white still sound expensive to me?

Yeah, a little bit.

I don't particularly want good coffee to become something that feels like a luxury purchase, and I certainly don't want to put prices up simply because we can.

But I also want Bond Street to be a sustainable business.

I want us to be able to pay our staff properly. I want to keep buying really good coffee. I want to work with great suppliers. And I want the café to still be here in another ten years.

All of those things cost more than they used to.

So I've tried to find a balance. Rather than putting prices up as much as they perhaps should increase, we're making a relatively small 20p adjustment.

Hopefully that feels fair.

And I promise the hot water is still free.