There were two offline meetups. The first one was at Gusto. The second one was at McDonalds.
At Gusto, the drink bar was 439 yen. I drank four cups. (Gusto is a family restaurant chain in Japan. With a drink bar, you pay once and refill as much as you want.)
At McDonalds, a medium coffee was 190 yen.
I stayed for two hours for 190 yen. That should not be possible. 190 yen. Thank you for the coffee. But I could not simply be glad.
Cheap. Too cheap. How can a store keep running at this price?
The Same Coffee Is 490 Yen in America
It bothered me, so I looked it up.
In America, the same McDonalds coffee is $2.99 for a medium. At 164 yen to the dollar, that is about 490 yen.
190 yen and 490 yen. Same chain. Same coffee. More than twice the price.
I checked Starbucks too.
McDonalds small: 150 yen in Japan, about 390 yen in America
McDonalds medium: 190 yen in Japan, about 490 yen in America
Starbucks Tall: 420 yen in Japan, about 435 yen in America
Starbucks Grande: 465 yen in Japan, about 485 yen in America
Starbucks costs almost the same in Japan and America. Only McDonalds is extremely cheap in Japan.
It Was Not the Coffee That Was Different
The beans are the same type. The machines are the same commercial ones. The manuals are the same around the world.
So what is different?
At McDonalds in America, the hourly wage is $15 to $20. In yen, that is 2,460 to 3,280 yen. In Japan, it is 1,000 to 1,200 yen.
The coffee is more than twice the price, but the coffee was not the problem. The only difference was the pay of the people who work there.
It can be sold for 190 yen because this is a country where the wages make it possible to run a store at 190 yen.
Thirty years ago, I hear, Japan and America were not that far apart. The world went up. Japan stopped.
It is not that the price of coffee has not changed. It is the price of this country that has not changed.
The Prices Around Me Are Going Up
The prices I feel in daily life are clearly going up.
Beer went up a little. Not enough to make me stop and think before I buy it, but more and more often at the register I think, “Huh, was it always this expensive?”
Rice is clearly expensive. Compared to a few years ago, it is maybe about double. I looked at the price tag on the bag twice.
Prices are going up. There is no doubt about that.
But wages are not going up. They stay where they are, and only the prices around us keep rising.
And still, McDonalds coffee stays at 190 yen.
While prices rise, some stores keep their prices where they are. What holds that up is probably the pay of the people who work there.
There Was a Strange Measure: A Story From the Factory Floor
I worked on a manufacturing floor for forty years.
From the time I started there, the rule was to measure efficiency by “cost divided by time.” The floor was rated by how much cost it earned per hour.
But some processes had no cost booked at all. We spent time on work that nobody had put a price on. Its cost was “zero,” so no matter how hard we worked, that number did not go up.
Of course, not all of it was like that. Some processes had a solid cost assigned to them, the so-called “juicy” ones. Some just broke even. Some were low, and some were high.
But the processes I handled for a long time were the ones with little cost assigned to them. So many times I thought, “This cannot be right.”
Still, nobody fixed it. There was no room to fix it, and nobody was willing to listen to ideas for fixing it.
“Raise efficiency. Do the work of two people alone.” That was the floor I worked on.
190 Yen, Thank You for the Coffee
Two hours of sitting for 190 yen. I should be grateful. But I could not honestly be glad.
Behind this 190 yen, someone is standing there working for 1,000 yen an hour.
I did something similar for 40 years in manufacturing. I was told to raise efficiency, and I did the work of two people alone. In the end, that was probably the same story.
A 190 yen coffee I happened to drink at a meetup. When I paid, I only thought, “That is cheap.” Then I looked it up, and it led to this story.
190 yen, thank you for the coffee. But honestly, I would not complain at 500 yen, or even at 1,000 yen.
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