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My Facebook "price of coffee" experiment: 40 countries

4 points by Lucadg ↗ HN
The other day I asked my friends in Facebook to tell me - where they are now - how much is a coffee - the quality of the coffee

It may seems trivial but I wanted to test the power of Facebook/internet.

I got 55 replies from about 30 countries + one guy in the middle of the Atlantic ocean (he works on a cruise ship).

I find this amazing.

I think this is the first time in human history that we can get so precise information, so fast and so cheaply (free). Nobody cares about the price and quality of coffee now of course. But maybe some of us will find a way to extract valuable information or insight from that. A startup idea?

12 comments

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yial
Well, what were the prices of coffee?
zegmas
so.. how about that coffee price?
lewisflude
What were the prices of the coffee???
imrehg
I started to run my own experiment of this. Here are the results so far, not 40 countries yet, but we'll see

http://goo.gl/xtWw8

yial
I'll give you some US Prices. US, PA: Small coffee shop with State College, (Websters) 2$ for a single cup, good coffee.

Shrewsbury, PA (Browns) 1.5 for a cup with refills. Very good.

Scranton, PA - $3 dollars at Crimson Lion. (Hoookah Bar and coffee shop.)

Other coffee shops can be as high as 4-5 dollars a cup. W/o much if any increase in quality. Specialty drinks are insanely priced.

imrehg
Thanks, added those :)
Cub3
So.... prices?

And I don't understand how you could quantify the "quality", i'd say the coffee in Vic, Australia is excellent but I haven't ever had coffee in a different country?

I be interested to know how the quality of coffee in my hometown differs from New York though?

jamespcole2
The coffee here in Victoria, AU is amazing, I've had coffee in probably around 15 - 20 different countries and while I get the odd good coffee here and there the consistent quality here is hard to beat. Many countries in general don't actually use espresso machines(north america in particular) so the "quality" of the coffee is questionable. But in the end I guess "good" also depends on what you're used to.

BTW: Coffee here in Melbourne(at least on the north side) is about $3.20AUD(~$3.35USD) to $6AUD depending on size. If you're in Melbourne and want a great coffee I recommend Proud Mary's or Dr. Java they are both excellent.

gizmo686
> But maybe some of us will find a way to extract valuable information or insight from that. Isn't that Google's business model (and that of many others).
Lucadg
well, this is an interesting point. Google can pick up and organize information only when it's been digitalized. With this experiment I was able to generate it. None of the people who wrote was planning to write down the price and quality of coffee in the next days.
tomflack
Did you account for wild variations in the same place? In Shanghai I could get decent coffee for anywhere between 3 kuai to 30 kuai depending on where you were.
Lucadg
Please apologize for not posting the results, as I did not really mean them to be important in themselves. The point was not the price/quality of coffee, but the fact that we can ask a question and get 40 replies in matter of hours from all over the world, for free. Here's the results anyway https://www.facebook.com/tripluca/posts/10151133967508483?co...

maybe somebody can come up with something more meaningful/interesting/valuable than the coffee price.