Are We Paying for Coffee or for a Place to Sit?
There was a time when going to a café meant ordering coffee, catching up with someone, and leaving.
Now, a café can be your backup office when the WiFi at home gives up, your reading spot on a Sunday, the place where you meet a friend, take a work call, sit alone for an hour, or simply avoid going home just yet.
Somewhere along the way, cafés became our third place: somewhere that is neither home nor work, but still feels comfortable enough to spend time in.
Except sitting there is getting expensive
Walk into a café in any major Indian city and a basic coffee can easily set you back a few hundred rupees. Add something to eat, another drink after a couple of hours, and suddenly your quiet afternoon out has turned into a fairly expensive habit.
At that point, you are clearly paying for more than coffee.
You are paying for the air-conditioning, the WiFi, the table, the charging point, the music, the clean washroom and, most importantly, the fact that nobody minds if you sit there for two hours with your laptop open.
The coffee has almost become your entry fee.
So who gets to have a third place?
That is where the idea becomes a little uncomfortable.
A third place is supposed to give people somewhere to exist outside home and work. But if spending time there regularly requires a few hundred rupees every visit, it is no longer equally accessible to everyone.
Yes, parks, libraries and public spaces still exist. But they do not always offer the things people now expect from a place where they can work, read or spend a few hours comfortably: reliable WiFi, plug points, air-conditioning, easy access to food and a seat that you know will be there.
Cafés stepped into that gap very neatly.
They did not create our need for somewhere to go. They simply became one of the easiest ways to meet it.
And perhaps that is what we are really buying
For some people, café visits are still an occasional treat. For others, they have become part of the monthly budget. Some people work out of cafés several times a week. Others have stopped going as often because spending ₹300 – ₹500 just to sit somewhere no longer feels casual.
Which makes the coffee question slightly misleading.
Maybe we are not really asking whether coffee has become too expensive.
Maybe we are asking why having a pleasant place to sit outside home and work has become something we increasingly have to pay for.
