Please Just Let Millennials Enjoy Our Coffee

The coffee scolds are back. They are financial gurus, newspaper columnists, and multimillionaire TV personalities, and they pop up every few years on talk shows and in major newspapers to tell us—Millennials, specifically—to put down the latte, step away from the counter, and back slowly out of the cafe. We’re still spending too much money on coffee, you see, and we’re going to regret it.

This has been going on for years. In 2019, the author and celebrity financial advisor Suze Orman criticised people for wasting money on coffee, which she compared to “peeing $1 million down the drain” because the cash saved could be invested instead. Kevin O’Leary, the businessman and Shark Tank star, has also railed against takeaway coffee, going back to 2017 when he called it “a waste of money for something that costs 20 cents”.

Further back, in 2013, the radio host and personal finance personality Dave Ramsey named coffee one of the 10 things Americans waste money on. (It really is ingrained: if you Google “things Americans waste their money on”, as I did trying to find that Ramsey article, coffee pops right up alongside “buying into trends” and “gambling”.)

The spark for this latest round of joyless hectoring came from a survey commissioned by McDonald’s, which asked people in the United Kingdom how much they spent on takeaway coffee in a year, and then divided the respondents into generations. According to the “study”, Millennials spend £728 ($956), the most of any generation—more than Gen Z, and triple that of Baby Boomers. 

Generational warfare plus fiscal shaming is guaranteed to garner headlines, clicks, and general online discourse (of which I’m as guilty as anyone). The British press, not known for its subtlety, took the bait: The Daily Mail, the Mirror, and the Sun all called the sum “staggering”, while the Daily Star went with “eye-watering”. 

It has become tired and cliched to blame Millennials for everything, from our coffee habits to our lack of spending in other areas. According to the media, our frugality and fickle tastes have killed department stores, casual dining, even cereal (?). At the same time, Millennials’ spending on coffee and avocado toast is apparently the reason why we can’t afford to buy a house or pay off our student loans.

So which is it—are Millennials profligate, shiftless, and racking up debt, or are our spendthrift ways responsible for destroying entire industries?

The question is, why should we listen to what multimillionaire celebrities and opinion columnists have to say about all this, anyway? And how has the takeaway coffee become such a powerful symbol of these intergenerational conflicts?

The Cursed Generation

Millennials are sometimes referred to as a “cursed” or “loser” generation, as well as the first global generation. Those born between 1981 and 1996 grew up right as the internet was taking off, which afforded new opportunities for learning and socialising. However, many also graduated into the depths of the Great Recession and a distinct lack of jobs (hi!). Between 2008 and 2013, 3.7 million workers lost their jobs in the U.K., while in the United States, an average of 700,000 workers lost their jobs each month between October 2008 and April 2009. Many of those jobs never returned in the same form.

In a 2017 article for Highline, journalist and podcaster Michael Hobbes laid out the specific difficulties Millennials face. “What is different about us as individuals compared to previous generations is minor”, Hobbes wrote. “What is different about the world around us is profound. Salaries have stagnated and entire sectors have cratered. At the same time, the cost of every prerequisite of a secure existence—education, housing and health care—has inflated into the stratosphere.”

As Hobbes outlines, college costs orders of magnitude more than it did for previous generations, housing was (and still is) more expensive, and retirement funds don’t accumulate like they used to. And Millennials aren’t young anymore—if you were born in 1996, the generally-agreed-upon cut-off point for the generation, you will be 28 this year. That’s deep into adult territory, while demographic shifts mean that there will be fewer workers to support Millennials when they reach retirement age, putting an added burden on social security.

That said, although previous generations have accumulated more wealth than Millennials, it’s worth noting that broadly sweeping statements miss out on a lot of nuance. Many Boomers (born 1946–1964) lost everything in the 2008 housing crisis and were forced out of retirement, while Gen X—the “forgotten generation”, born 1965–1980—has “a dismal retirement outlook” according to the National Institute on Retirement Security. And of course, every generation thinks it is the most maligned.

But Millennials do seem to be uniquely screwed. “The Millennials entered the workforce during the worst downturn since the Great Depression”, wrote Annie Lowrey in the Atlantic in 2020. “Saddled with debt, unable to accumulate wealth, and stuck in low-benefit, dead-end jobs, they never gained the financial security that their parents, grandparents, or even older siblings enjoyed”. 

An Easy Target

In the midst of those financial doldrums, Millennials are apparently turning to the small comfort of takeaway coffee in record numbers. But why has coffee become such a potent symbol of Millennial profligacy? Why does the humble latte, along with avocado toast, instantly conjure associations with excess and indulgence in the minds of older generations (or at least their millionaire talking heads in the media)?

In a 2019 piece in the Atlantic, Amanda Mull notes that “the accusation that buying fancy coffee is wasteful has seeped into the conventional wisdom of contemporary America, even for people who couldn’t name any financial celebrities but struggle between the allure of small pleasures and the constraints of their personal budget”.

Lattes (and those who bought them) were an easy target in the late ’90s and early 2000s, Mull argues. They were feminised and liberal-coded—the phrase “latte liberal” became a pejorative for a certain kind of wealthy, out-of-touch progressive, especially during the Obama years—while the proliferation of urban coffee shops fed into suburbs-versus-cities culture wars. “Those young people, toting their laptops to coffee shops to sip almond-milk coffee concoctions, weren’t just rejecting Folgers, but also a few other key values of their parents’ generation, which venerated things like marriage and home ownership”, Mull writes.

Specialty coffee also became a visible marker of gentrification in American cities in the 2010s. Coffee shops symbolised the practice of mostly wealthy, mostly white, mostly young professionals moving into low-income neighbourhoods and ousting their residents. And coffee has been doing this for longer than you might think: “There’s a long history of coffee shops accompanying an influx of middle-class people and tastes into poorer neighbourhoods”, wrote Katie Kilkenny in Pacific Standard. “Though coffee’s long been an affordable drink for the masses, coffee shops have—for just as long—appealed primarily to the leisure class”.

These depictions of Millennials as wealthy urban layabouts sipping their soy lattes to the strains of Fleet Foxes might explain why Boomer media types have found it so easy to target them. Whether that stereotype actually fits most Millennials is seemingly unimportant.

“[G]eneralisations about millennials, like those about any other arbitrarily defined group of 75 million people, fall apart under the slightest scrutiny,” Hobbes wrote in his 2017 Highline piece. “Contrary to the cliché, the vast majority of millennials did not go to college, do not work as baristas and cannot lean on their parents for help. Every stereotype of our generation applies only to the tiniest, richest, whitest sliver of young people.”

Listen to Me, a Rich Person

Still, such Millennial stereotypes contrast perfectly with the frugal image that many celebrity finance gurus and opinion columnists like to cultivate. Kevin O’Leary makes his coffee at home every morning. (“I never buy a frappe-latte-blah-blah-blah-woof-woof-woof for $2.50”, he told CNBC.) Suze Orman drives a 12-year-old car and doesn’t eat in restaurants. (“I really do not like to spend money to go out to eat—I don’t like it. It’s so much money”.)

Last week, in the Independent, Paul Clements told Millennials that it is “time to kick your ridiculous coffee habit”, while Vanessa Feltz in the Express called us “extravagant, wasteful copy-cats with absolutely no concept of fiscal responsibility and dormant taste buds”.

Much like Orman and O’Leary’s frugal posturing, Clements’ suggestion is to brew your coffee at home—he recommends instant, because it’s cheaper and more environmentally friendly (which, in a carbon-footprint-focused sort of a way, is true). Feltz, meanwhile, doesn’t have any good suggestions, and is clearly just trolling for clicks.

However, she shares something in common with Orman and O’Leary: lots of money. The British TV personality is reportedly worth £38 million (about $49 million), while Orman has a net worth of $75 million and O’Leary has some $400 million to his name. And although Clements probably isn’t a millionaire, he’s a deputy editor at the Independent and has previously worked as features editor for the Daily Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday, jobs which pay pretty well.

The point is, none of these people need to worry about enjoying a few lattes each week. O’Leary once even admitted to spending $5,000 a week on food. But their “advice” isn’t for people like them: It’s for young, irresponsible idiots who are addicted to specialty coffee and don’t understand the concept of compound interest.

Much of their “advice” is also pretty meaningless when you take a closer look. According to one financial researcher, it’s simply not possible to save up for a house deposit just by skipping your morning coffee, especially once you take inflation into account. Not to mention the fact that, if Millennials stop buying lattes to save up instead, we’d almost surely be blamed for killing coffee shops.

Industry Killers

For as long as Millennials have been critiqued for our lavish spending habits, we’ve also been accused of refusing to support various industries, resulting in their untimely demise. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of the things Millennials supposedly “killed” in the heyday of this type of panic: the housing market, obviously; casual dining (including chains like Applebee’s and TGI Friday’s); department stores; gyms; beer; raisins, weirdly; and the diamond industry (which, good). 

Of course, that was all nonsense. “Industry disruption was happening long before millennials came along, and it will continue long after”, read an article by research company CB Insights. “The brands that manage to survive changes in consumer preferences are the ones that listen, adapt, and realise that shifting markets are not a threat, but an opportunity for creative transformation”.

The fact that coffee has been so successful with Millennials actually exemplifies just that. Coffee companies—specialty coffee companies specifically—figured out how to market themselves to younger customers, and those customers rewarded them with loyalty.

Millennials grew up just as specialty coffee was taking off, and the differentiation between third-wave coffee and what came before was stark. Specialty coffee brands were cool and sometimes a bit punk, but also focused on sustainability and quality in a way that meshed well with young Millennials’ values and self-image.

As we grew up, big brands and multinationals picked up on specialty coffee’s popularity and began marketing themselves accordingly; just witness the proliferation of the once-niche flat white among coffee chains around the world. Starbucks was particularly adept at wooing Millennials, “taking advantage of digital marketing, creating reward incentives, and fostering a space where millennials want to meet face-to-face”, according to a 2014 article in The Business Journals.

It’s almost as if these financial gurus’ relentless focus on Millennials and coffee is not about creating good spending habits but is instead about criticising trends that they feel excluded from. After all, their tastes are by and large emblematic of the times when they came of age—coffee’s first wave, drinking instant at home, blah blah woof woof. Avocado toast (which is, incidentally, delicious, and has numerous health benefits) wasn’t exactly a staple of Boomer adolescence.

It certainly seems like this fixation on lattes and avocados is really about the anxiety of the world moving on without them—about a lifestyle (and youthfulness) that they aren’t a part of and don’t understand.

Little Luxuries

In the end, what people spend their spare money on is nobody else’s business. Some people collect guitars (like Kevin O’Leary); others pay to watch their local football team. Some like to attend wine tastings; others like to spend millions on watches (O’Leary again). The point is, if you enjoy it and it’s not harming anyone, go for it. 

And now, “in the midst of our swingeing cost-of-living crisis” (Feltz again), why would we deny ourselves the small joy of a delicious, relatively affordable treat? As the time management and productivity author Laura Vanderkam told Mull in the Atlantic, “Little luxuries actually have a real effect on people’s happiness. It’s these small, repeated treats that do a lot for you long term”. Cutting out your weekly coffee isn’t going to pay your rent, but it might make the rest of your day a bit better.

Of course we should all spend responsibly and save where we can. But there’s only so much we can do on our own when wages are stagnant and house prices keep rising. According to the BBC, you would have to skip 15,975 avocado toasts to save up enough for a deposit on a San Francisco apartment. And that was in 2017—god knows how many more toasts you’d need to turn down today.

In the end, all coffee shaming does is shift the blame from wider society onto the individual. It wasn’t corporate malfeasance that caused the stock and housing market crash in 2008, and it wasn’t a political decision to impose austerity as a remedy. It was your fault for buying all those lattes, and that’s why you can’t afford a house.