TIL, as they say at Reddit.
I’m always suspicious of ‘there are no X in Y’ sentences. Authoritative people have said There Are No Pianos In Japan, and There Are No Basements In Oklahoma. I can debunk the latter from experience, and the former is easily disproved by Yamaha with a long history of making fine pianos.
Listening to a mostly boring interview with a Starbucks booster on Yahoo Finance. Starbucks is trying to invade China, still following (or pretending to follow) the ancient myth of China as our best export market. 40 years of offshoring should have debunked this one, but it still seems to grab investors whether Starbucks believes it or not.
The Starbucks booster thinks China is ripe for coffee because the average coffee consumption in China equals 12 cups per person per year.
This is truly astonishing. Tea started in China, and I’d expect tea to be strongly dominant. But coffee has a way of taking over wherever it’s tried.
The stat clearly doesn’t mean that each person drinks a few cups; it means that a small part of the population drinks every day. It’s physically impossible to drink 12 cups a year. If you drink coffee at all, you drink at least one a day. Daily or nothing.
Well, is the average stat true? This website says that China imports about $500 million in coffee per year. That’s about 500 million pounds at wholesale, which is about half a pound per person. Yup, 12 cups is on the dot.
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Personal measurement: Since I order coffee from nuts.com, I can look up my order history to check my consumption. 24 pounds in the last year. Much of this is wasted by my peculiar coffeemaking method and my two-part sleep. I make about 12 cups a day and drink about 6. I’ve stopped worrying about wasting electricity and materials. Since 2020 I’m aiming for COMFORT above all, attempting to maintain my soul in the face of universal monstrosity. Hot coffee in the thermos at all times is COMFORT.
Polistra's Mill 