I've recently purchased a SunBeam Espresso machine and have been trying to improve my home coffee's
Sorry to hear that. I've owned quite a few different home machines (never broke the $600 mark thoug) and the one machine I wasn't happy with was a sunbeam. Fortunately David Jones had great customer service at the time.
All you coffee drinkers worried about the price of coffee consider a few things...
How much do you pay for a beer or a glass of wine? A cafe/bar/pub is generally paying roughly the same amount for a worker pouring a drink whether it be coffee or something else. I am able to churn out beer, wine, spirits, mixed drinks, and so on at a pretty rapid rate working in the bar on my own (* see funny ego boosting story below). By comparison taking orders and preparing coffee without another staff member or 2 is really challenging, this can really pump up your staffing costs. Preparing a coffee takes a bit more time than opening a beer or pouring a wine, incurs a higher % of waste in preparation (though a friend of mine would say differently with a few of his current staff!), requires a massive capital investment (eg espresso machines $20-30k are fairly common and a matching grinder can be $3-5k). Sure a big tap system isn't cheap either but the sale volume between the 2 is usually pretty different. Over the last 10 or so years the cost per cup of coffee has gone up. Milk has been reasonably stable, but utilities like power, insurance, delivery/fuel, foods, and the cost per shot of coffee as well (coffee per kg and the amount used per shot). When I was a student in 1736 most cafes ran around 10 grams of coffee per shot. This has grown over the years 14, 16, 18, 20, 22 grams...at 18 grams per shot you need be pretty tidy with your grinder to yield 20 cups of coffee per kilo and a kilo will probably cost a minimum of $30 and probably more. When someone buys a coffee they don't normally come back and buy a second one in 15-20 minutes, or a third fourth fifth sixth...but they often sit down and enjoy the brew for about 20-30 minutes. Depending on the nature of your business this can really eat into sales. I was working in an espresso bar with take away focus a while back. We would have a social group drop in once a week, 20-25 people, who would all order 1 coffee and fill up the spaxefor about 45-60 minutes. Because they were a big group it was noisey as a herd of elephants, they'd leave a massive mess, deter other customers because of wait times + noise, and of course they believed they were the savours of the business because there was so many of them... 25 x 4 isn't very much. Lastly fuck me commercial rent is expensive! This expense has soared in a lot of places while the return for business has been pretty stable for a while...$4-5 per cup.
And fuck me if you alternative milk types don't make life hard!!! It seems once whatever version is trendy reaches a solid market penetration you're off googling a jew alternative to be pissy people aren't stocking! Do you have paw paw milk here? How about some man milk arsehole?
Anyway I don't want coffee to be more expensive either! I love the stuff and it's taken a lot of money from me over the years. But it must be tricky for some small business operators to stay buoyant at the moment.
* ego boost story here: last year I got stuck working in a bar on my own. There was over 1000 people in and the dinning room crew were having trouble getting food + coffee out so my off sidereal got called away to help out. I got told to "make it work..." so I encouraged my ragged crowd of thirst merchants to form up 2 neat lines, 1 for each til. So I was working 2 tils like a hooked with a room full of sailors! Bottle tops flying everywhere, corks popping, serve one customer their drinks + fire up the eftpos + start next customer at other til, back and forwards. It's funny to note that I obviously wasn't as fast as 2 people doing the job, but when a crowd can see your busting a nut they are surprisingly supportive. If there had been 2 of me working at that speed there would've been a riot! Anyway relief comes! I'm saved!!! Off sider is a touch flustered switching from the dinning room to the bar and is a little slow off the mark...a few customers in and one of the crowd fires up "fuck off mate! He was faster without you!" A few days later the boss has heard about it and thinks it's pretty funny "you probably were mate..." where's my gold star then?