044: The hills we die on

Does this title make it sound like I'm a ghost from the Civil War? 👻

Hi friends,

You might have noticed some branding changes abounding recently. All I can say is that I never really ~loved~ the branding I had before and that after 23 months of writing here I have finally found a look I like. This is why you should always just start even if things aren’t perfect—imagine if I’d missed out on the last 23 months of writing with you all over something as silly as the ~branding~. Exactly.

In other news, I hope you liked last week’s interview with Elizabeth Held! She’s great and her Substack, What To Read If, is a great resource if you’re looking for your next book to read. Our next interview comes out next Wednesday!

Also, thank you to everyone who sent me really lovely replies to my last essay. It was so kind of you to reach out and I really appreciate it.

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Source.

I woke up this morning thinking about the hills we die on.

I’m not sure what was happening in my sleep that this was the conversation my brain wanted to have as I brushed my teeth. But, alas, I woke up thinking about the hills people are willing to die on and, more specifically, wondering which hills I’m willing to die on.

For those unfamiliar, ‘a hill I will die on’ is an internet euphemism for ‘a thing I strongly believe’ or ‘a value I hold dearly.’ It can be used seriously (“The US needs a better healthcare system I will die on this hill”) or facetiously (“Banff is the best national park in the world I WILL DIE ON THIS HILL”).

Sometimes I think I’m unsettlingly dispassionate—I get riled up, sure, but I also let things go too easily. It’s hard for me to sustain any level of anger for long. I’m not enlightened, I’m tired.

But it turns out that there are hills I would die on. Maybe they’re weird ones, but they’re mine.

The Oxford Comma

In a list sentence, there should be a comma between the penultimate and the final item in the sentence. Without one, it leads to unnecessary confusion. If the point of writing is to convey a message, why would you deliberately make it less clear?

Case in point:

Without: I love my parents, Lady Gaga and Adam Driver.

This implies that your parents are Lady Gaga and Adam Driver, and if that’s the case, how did they keep that secret?

With: I love my parents, Lady Gaga, and Adam Driver.

This suggests that Lady Gaga and Adam Driver are individual entities that you love, in addition to your parents.

We don’t pay enough for coffee

In true “pitch that’s been rejected a thousand times” Collected Rejections vibes, I have been trying to write this story for years and no one would accept it. Because no one wants to hear it. Everyone thinks coffee is too expensive now, and no one wants to be told all the economic reasons why it’s priced way too low. I’m here to tell you you’re wrong—coffee is cheap. Here’s why:

1. You’re paying less for coffee than your grandparents did. The price of coffee hasn’t risen over time to match inflation, so it effectively costs less now than it used to.

2. This declining price doesn’t take into account the huge improvement in coffee quality that we’ve seen over the past fifty years. Farmers and scientists understand coffee better now, and the coffee we’re producing is leagues away from what was being grown, roasted, and sold on grocery store shelves in the 1960s. Usually, an improvement in quality would lead to higher prices (see: Forever 21’s shitty clothes versus J. Crew’s quality clothes.) but here it hasn’t.

3. While improvements in manufacturing can lower price (see: assembly lines lowering the price of cars), that’s not the kind of industrial improvement that’s happened in coffee. If anything, making coffee is getting more labor expensive because there isn’t good equipment to “replace” human workers. Moreover, these workers are having to get more and more specially trained to identify better coffee while it’s still on the tree in order to meet the demand for higher quality coffee.

4. The current (and historic) price model for coffee was so low to begin with because of the horrifying amount of human exploitation that occurs at every level of the supply chain:

   1. The raw coffee prices are set by heavyweights in the industry (Nestlé, Folgers, Starbucks, McDonald’s) who pay ridiculously low C-market prices so that they can roast, grind, and sell coffee at ridiculously low retail prices. They can do this because they can tell a farmer, “Sell it to me for [ridiculously low price] or I won’t buy any at all.” Coffee is agricultural product that goes bad; farmers have to sell it. They can’t just sit on it for a year and wait for a higher bidder. But accepting such a low price means they usually can’t feed their families/pay their workers/save money. It also depresses prices across the industry, because other bad actors can then say, “Well we’re paying more than Nestlé,” as if that’s some sort of accomplishment.

   2. Slave labor and exploitative wages have, across time, served to lower wages. Think that’s a thing of the past? It isn’t! Slaves were found working coffee plantations in Brazil in 2018. Your coffee is cheap because the people that grew and harvested it were forced to against their will and without pay.

   3. Meanwhile, in consuming countries, most hourly workers aren’t paid a living wage. In the US, baristas are classed as “tipped” employees which means that their bosses can legally pay them below minimum wage. (I put tipped in quotations because most of you aren’t tipping your barsitas.) The idea behind this legislation was that instead of having the owner of a restaurant or cafe pay their servers, that cost is passed on to you, the consumer. Which is ridiculous because covering costs is why we pay for… everything. When you pay for clothes or groceries, your money goes toward paying for the supplies and workers that made that product available. That lobbyists ever got this law passed for food & bev is a feat of persuasion that I can’t comprehend because it runs directly counter to how the rest of the US retail economy works. What it means in practice is that people are pissy about tipping, so they don’t tip because they think that’s taking a stand. But the only person hurt by you not tipping is the barista; the boss is fine. The boss’s salary and the cost of the cup of coffee were included in that listed price you paid. In many states and cities, servers and baristas can be legally paid $2.13 per hour.

5. The aforementioned declining price also doesn’t take into account the spread of coffee plant disease nor the ongoing climate crisis, both of which result in less coffee being available. It’s wild—basic macroeconomics teaches us that lower supply should raise prices, but people are so up in arms about their $3 coffee that suppliers won’t raise prices. Technically your coffee should cost more today based on scarcity alone, but I guess it hasn’t gotten “real enough” yet to impact the market. Meanwhile, there are people living on coffee-producing farms in Central America who have never tasted their own coffee because they have to sell all of it just to survive.

Ashley Rodriguez, over at BOSS BARISTA, wrote a much better version of this article than I could ever hope to. Check it out:

The Paradox of Coffee Pricing

You 👏🏼 aren’t 👏🏼 paying 👏🏼 enough 👏🏼 for 👏🏼 coffee.👏🏼 I will give this lecture in person to anyone who complains outloud in my presence.

That story about Dakota Johnson locking people in Blue Bottle? Fake.

As hilarious as it is to picture Dakota Johnson locking people inside a Blue Bottle and the guests and baristas having to wait for passersby to let them out, it just doesn’t bear scrutiny.

First of all—almost all food businesses have to have two entrances/exits. This is as much for fire safety as it is for food safety. (In the event of a fire in the kitchen, you don’t want workers have to go through the fire to get to the only exit at the front.) A lot of cities don’t allow you to take trash or recycling out through the front door during operating hours, including New York City. (I think the logic is because removing waste this way runs the risk of contaminating a guest’s food? There’s even a joke about it in a Friends episode, so you know it’s true.) So the Blue Bottle in question has to have a back door that leads to a trash/recycling space. Even if Dakota Johnson really had locked people inside the Blue Bottle with the rope she carried in her purse (???), any of the baristas working that day could have simply gone out the back door, exited the building, and untied the rope. The idea that they would have to wait for passersby to do it is ridiculous.

The whole rumor reads like it was started by someone who has never worked in food and bev.

Second of all—I worked at Blue Bottle and even if no one there reported this story to TMZ, they would have told other coworkers. That story would have been passed through the national rumor mill. The fact that no one I know who works/ed at Blue Bottle (and many people do work there for years and years) remember hearing about this tells me it’s fake.

And finally—just look at the Twitter account that started the rumor. It’s all memes and jokes.

All La Croix is bad

I’m sorry, but it is. It all tastes like someone ate fruit then coughed on soda water and in the year of our lord 2022 I am not drinking something that a stranger coughed on.

Also I just constitutionally cannot drink something with a French name that is so mangled. (It should be pronounced ‘la khw-ah’!) And I’m not sorry for that!

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Currently Reading

As part of my research for Unruly Figures, I’m currently reading Wallis and Edward: Letters, 1931-1937. I’m actually doing something fun and interactive with this book, and I’d love for you to join in!

In the Threadable app, groups of people can read books together and comment in the margins, holding discussions. It brings all the fun of a book club into the palm of your hand. Right now, I’m hosting a reading group to read a selection of letters Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII exchanged in the days before he abdicated the throne—a heady time in English history to be sure.

To join, download Threadable in the app store. (I believe it’s only available to iOS users right now.) To join our Unruly Figures Reading Circle, use code 03701. I’ve even recorded a quick little video to show you how to join the group and leave comments.

If you have any questions, shoot me an email or leave a comment, I’ll get it and respond ASAP!

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Tell me: What hill would you die on?

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You made it all the way to the end! Congrats! Here’s a funny tweet:

Memenspro Mori @ditriech

@getchusomegear God the only thing that immediately came to mind was “Jesus cares how you brew not who you screw” which is probably a step over the line

Also, the aforementioned Friends clip with Larry the Health Inspector Guy:

Start at 2:59 for the joke I’m referring to.

I’m an affiliate with Bookshop.org. That just means that if you click one of the links above to buy something, I’ll receive a few cents from your purchase, but it won’t cost anything extra for you!