A 15-yuan hand-brewed coffee: middle-class symbols and working-class hardship

Coffee, an imported drink, has long been treated as a symbol of middle-class refinement. As a drink, however, it is not so different from tea. Both contain stimulating alkaloids, both use inexpensive ingredients, and both are prepared by brewing. Perhaps coffee brings to mind baristas, careful preparation, high prices, and leisure that ordinary people rarely enjoy. Tea, by contrast, may suggest an older man with leaves floating in a glass. Expensive tea, like Moutai, is readily associated with power. That may be a continuation of attitudes formed in an age of scarcity: only the privileged could enjoy special supplies, while ordinary people had neither the goods nor the leisure. Coffee's middle-class image may come from its origins in capitalist countries and its widespread consumption among the middle classes there. It naturally became a symbol for China's emerging middle class: people with time and money to spend. Yet the ingredients are still inexpensive, and brewing coffee is not so different from making tea.

Perhaps because of that symbolism, the distribution of coffee shops in China follows income levels. Shanghai is said to have more coffee shops than any other city. A cup on the street costs from a little over ten yuan to twenty or thirty, and most are made with fully automatic machines. Perhaps that is simply what it costs to sell coffee in a large city. Even Starbucks is roughly in that range. For an office worker earning twenty or thirty thousand yuan a month, the price is small. Two cups a day would cost about 1,500 yuan a month.

Yet even in a city such as Shanghai, the coffee market seems too small. Domestic chains keep lowering prices to attract a middle class that is neither especially large nor especially wealthy. That produces inexpensive hand-prepared coffee such as Manner's. A drink made by hand sells for only fifteen yuan in a city where space is so expensive. We know who pays for that low price. According to reports, a Manner barista must make about 300 to 500 cups during an eight-hour shift: an average of 0.96 to 1.6 minutes per cup, for a monthly salary of only 5,000 to 8,000 yuan. The work is done standing. If a store takes less than 5,000 yuan a day, it has only one barista. That person must also stock supplies, clean, and do everything else.

The worker welcomes customers with a smile, makes coffee without proper time to eat or rest, and tries to survive in expensive Shanghai on a small salary. A shop of a few square meters has already become a powder keg. It takes only a spark. On a small surveillance screen, a distressed barista and a customer act out a tragedy of the times. Both the barista and the lower-middle-class customer struggle for the chance to sit down and enjoy a coffee in peace. Most people quietly bear systemic unfairness. Behind the appearance of calm, the cost of keeping society functioning rises. How long has it been since you said "please," "excuse me," "thank you," or "sorry" to someone? How long since a stranger said these things to you? Hostility and distance between people at the bottom pull society further toward cruelty.

The service sector bears heavy pressure from the economic downturn. Land, utilities, and materials cannot be squeezed as easily as labor. Faced with accusations from impatient customers, a barista first pleads, then finally breaks down. This reminds me of people who travel abroad and complain that service workers' smiles are insincere, merely part of a routine. They feel this because they also know that service workers are people: no one can give all their emotional energy to others for eight hours a day. There is one exception—when a worker is treated as an inferior. Some customers want to bully someone powerless. A service worker who stands with dignity makes them uncomfortable, like an empress seeing someone refuse to kneel. The barista is helpless and desperate. To survive on a small wage, the worker must endure insults and ask politely until reaching a breaking point. I am sure that these angry buyers, willing to pay only a little over ten yuan for handmade coffee, are themselves helpless in other situations. Even so, they can comfortably support the same brutal hierarchy.

A society organized through the transmission and control of power cannot easily produce fair and open-minded values. This incident is not simply about the manners or morals of people at the bottom. That structure of power has helped lead society into its present dead end. Pressure passes from one person to another. When some escape responsibility while keeping the benefits, responsibility is passed down through layers, with a fee taken at every stage. By the time it reaches the lowest level, conflict is at its most intense. People may accept slow oppression and exploitation in exchange for one small reward from the hierarchy: the power to mistreat someone weaker. That fifteen-yuan hand-brewed coffee is the final poisoned cup with which the system buys the loyalty of lower-paid office workers.