Here’s jeers to the $6 cafe latte (from a coffee philistine)

Six dollars is break-even now. For a cup of coffee, that is. For the cafe owner. That’s what the woman told her workmates, at a table I was reading at, outside their offices. A man at the table asked if she was sure that wasn’t just something cafe owners said to justify their prices. He pointed out that when he makes a coffee at home it costs him next to nothing.

“Yeah,” she said, “but you’re not paying yourself to make it, and you don’t have a coffee-machine mortgage.”

He reminded her he has a mortgage on a house. I missed a chunk of the exchange. When I tuned in again, a woman was saying, “It’s no different to celery. If it was celery that cost that much, we’d be debating about celery.” Another, who until then had been neutral, pointed out that she never used to eat celery before she had kids but now it’s her go-to snack, with dip. Someone suggested she try peanut butter.

Coffee – more than celery ever dared pipe-dream – is unambiguously winning at life in Australia. Each Sunday I pass a place that appears to be little more than a portal in a wall. Never fewer than 20 citizens are queued there. People will park and lock the SUV, look both ways, cross and cheerily join the column. Can one cup of coffee be so much better than all others?

Being a coffee philistine, I wouldn’t know. Years ago I was training somebody at the place I work. Somehow we got talking about coffee. I confessed to buying my takeaway from a certain ubiquitous convenience store. He responded, with not nearly enough irony, “Well, I won’t be talking to you very much from now on, then.”

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Thing is, I don’t think I even tried hot coffee until I was maybe 20. Tea was always the thing. Mum tells me she and Dad drank coffee every so often but I just don’t remember it.

I do remember the first person my own age with a coffee habit. At 13, on the way to the bus stop each morning, I’d stop in for my friend Danny. His mum would be in her white terry-towel gown, shrouded in blue smoke, sipping coffee. He, too, was into the muddy beverage. He’d even dip his toast – peanut butter, if you please – for extra flavour.

The bean comes for us all, toys with us all, eventually convincing us we’re lacking without it.