In a Mug, Please
Credit: Tom Williams/Cartoonstock
Every Wednesday morning, I go for coffee with my colleagues. Well, peppermint tea in my case, but coffee for everyone else. We always go on a Wednesday morning, and we always drink it in a café. Now, before anyone gets huffy and self-righteous about overpaid, indolent office employees bludging off on extra-long coffee breaks, I will also mention that we've gotten into the habit of only buying coffee one day a week so that we can take a bit longer for morning tea on that one day. We do tend to spend our break talking about work-related topics too, so let's just call it a team meeting (sans agenda, representatives from upper management or any trace of professionalism).
This week was no exception. We went to our usual café. As usual it was busy, but not unusually so. Our regular table was free. Everybody likes this particular café. Apparently the coffee is good, and I can confirm that the peppermint tea is perfectly adequate. It’s ordering that’s the issue.
Now, I wouldn't expect the café workers to know our faces, regular orders or where we normally sit. It is always very busy, and I doubt they get paid enough to care. That said, they do work in a café with tables that people often choose to sit at, and there is a selection of ceramic mugs on the counter that people can point to when indicating which size they want. Would they not assume that some people are going to dine in? Nearly every table was occupied and, considering the layout of this café (i.e. exactly the same as every other café), I'd be amazed if they hadn't noticed.
As drinking coffee inside the establishment is clearly a common occurrence, why then, when we placed our order, was the question of where we planned to drink our warm beverages not asked?
In fairness, nobody asking me whether I was dining in or taking away was actually perfectly reasonable. As the server was trying to figure out how to process the perplexing request for a non-caffeinated beverage on her tablet, I was dangling a Keep Cup in her face.* However, the fact that the six non-Keep-Cup-holding, standard-coffee-with-cow's-milk-ordering members of my table were, a few minutes later, handed takeaway cups suggests that the café has a question-asking problem.
This is probably intentional. It likely costs them less to buy one thousand disposable coffee cups than pay an employee to collect and wash one thousand ceramic ones. Giving people disposable coffee cups when they are dining in also increases the likelihood that some of those procrastinating office workers will decide, mid-coffee, to go back to the office. A ceramic mug means there is no getting rid of them until the entire coffee has been drunk.
And then some.
Every office worker knows that an empty coffee mug on a café table allows them to keep sitting for as long as it remains there. They are also aware that work meetings conducted over empty coffee cups in nice cafés are always much more enjoyable than the ones conducted over printouts of spreadsheets in the office meeting room. Therefore, there is really no getting rid of them unless an army of servers are employed to whisk away empty mugs as soon as they are done. It is much cheaper just to hand out disposable ones and hope the holding of a takeaway coffee cup ignites a deep and primitive urge to leave.
That's exactly what happened at my table. Several people drifted back to the office before the end of our allotted morning teatime with the vague notion of having to work on something. Nobody ever seems pressed to work on anything when we are actually in the office, so I assume it was a subconscious reaction to the takeaway coffee cup.
Most people are probably thinking they would have opted out of a coffee shop catchup too if someone was banging on about disposable coffee cups, but I promise not a word was spoken. I am far too polite to comment on the wasteful practices of my fellow human beings. Especially those human beings that may, at some point in the future, be in a position to fire me. Positive workplace relations are essential, even if it means standing by while one’s colleagues slowly convert one’s national forests into a garbage tip. I simply took a sip from my Keep Cup, enjoyed several seconds of smug environmental superiority, then quietly pondered the paper cup situation.**
As I mentioned earlier, the café workers clearly (i.e., intentionally) missed their opportunity to ask the dine in or take away question. When one considers the common aversion most people have toward washing up, that's understandable. That said, I don't think we should all just agree to sit at cafés drinking out of paper cups to reduce the burden on hospitality staff. They did apply for the job. If the pile of dirty mugs next to the industrial dishwasher came as a shock on the first day of their barista career they probably shouldn't have decided on a vocation while binge watching old episodes of Friends.***
I don't blame the workers. It would be nice to think that employees working for companies with laissez faire environmental practices will make an extra effort to improve them, but why would they when they don't get paid all that much and none of the customers seem to care? If we want to go into a café and drink a cup of coffee (or peppermint tea), we need to make sure coffee shop employees know that we expect it in a real teacup. Therefore, we should always make a point of asking for it.
And we do want our coffee poured into a real teacup. While a single ceramic teacup has more of an environmental footprint to make and wash than one single-use paper cup, nobody has ever had one cup of coffee and thought, well that's enough for me during this lifetime. Most people have trouble limiting themselves to one per day, and all that wax paper-wrapped coffee tends to add up.
If purchasing a coffee is a once-a-year event, then I would agree that it is best not to invest in a reusable takeaway coffee cup, or fill coffee shops with ceramic mugs. A paper cup would have a smaller carbon footprint over the course of your lifetime. That said, if your favourite annual event is popping into a café so that someone else can make you a coffee, wouldn't you prefer to sit down and drink it out of a civilised receptacle? Ask for a mug.
If you go into cafés a little more regularly then that, insist that they serve you in something respectable. They already own a pile of teacups and mugs. Using them more often brings their carbon footprint down. Using a paper cup is just adding more unnecessary production and waste to a world that already has plenty of perfectly good ceramic mugs in it. (Not to mention all the Keep Cups stashed in the back of people's cupboards and behind their driver's seats.) If we are going to pay seven dollars for a cup of coffee, let's at least insist that it is served in something nicer than a cardboard tube. Your coffee deserves better and so does the planet.
The Quiet Environmentalist Further Reading
The disposable cup crisis: what’s the environmental impact of a to-go coffee? | Waste | The Guardian
Reusable or Disposable: Which coffee cup has a smaller footprint? (anthropocenemagazine.org)
*Dangle we must. Then we should always double check that the words 'Keep' and 'Cup' are written on the order slip before moving away from the till. This is imperative, for nothing is more egregious to a quiet environmentalist than handing a reusable cup to the person taking the order only to have the coffee maker hand you a beverage in a paper cup. You will stare at the paper cup for a moment, then at the lidless Keep Cup sitting alone and forgotten on top of the coffee machine. We know how this tragedy is going to end, but there is little we can do except point at the top of the machine and watch as the vaguely apologetic, sleep-deprived barista pours your drink into the glass cup and throws the paper one in the bin. They may be the world's greatest coffee maker, but they've just killed a paper cup unnecessarily and now we have to wash our Keep Cup, so we've already decided, pre-tasting, that the barista is total rubbish.
**It may seem rude that I was quietly thinking about paper coffee cups instead of listening to the conversation. Well, fair enough. It was rude. Daydreamers are on par with mobile phone addicts, and anyone who enjoys a coffee shop catchup would do best to avoid them both. At least people who look at their phones in cafés are honest about the fact that they are not listening. In my defence, the pondering occurred at a moment when the conversation was focused on matters pertaining to work, making it perfectly acceptable to not listen. Work has already ruined most perfectly nice offices. It shouldn't be allowed to ruin all the coffee shops too.
***Central Perk probably didn't need a dishwasher as most of their cliental were young Manhattanites living in far nicer apartments than they could possibly afford. There was no way they could also afford to regularly lounge about in cafés buying coffee. Most of them had likely saved up and bought one coffee at an earlier point in their lives and, having been given the Wi-Fi password, felt that entitled them to return on a daily basis. In a few years smartphones will be invented and, when that happens, they will be able to put their free allocation of Wi-Fi to good use. They have all promised that as soon as they are logged on, they will buy a second cup.
Published 02 June 2024
