To start each day, like many others, I go to the nearest place that serves coffee acceptable to my standards. The same order every day, a 16oz hot Cafe Latte, and every day I pick up my coffee and it’s light, a few occasional pops of the lid revealing a not-insignificant chunk of my java is missing. After a couple of weeks, I’ve reached my breaking point, so I go out and buy a measuring cup, and the next morning after I’ve received my hot cup of joe I rush back to my dorm to see what I was skimped today.
Now I am no scientist, and I don’t know much about the mythical art of coffee brewing, but I am sure a 16oz coffee should have 16oz. This fact is as simple as 1=1, so I set out to confirm my suspicions. If you’d like to follow along at home for some reason, this is my process:
- Wake up, get dressed, and head straight for the coffee shop.
- Order a 16oz Cafe Latte, Hot (Ice will compromise the experiment).
- Rush that coffee back to your measuring cup as quickly as possible^ without disrupting the coffee.
- Measure your coffee, total liquid, and total foam.
- Record that data.
^coffee-to-measure time was around a minute.
| Date | Total (oz) | Coffee (oz) | Foam (oz) |
| 8/30/24 | 12 | 10 | 2 |
| 9/3/24 | 14.5 | 14 | 0.5 |
| 9/4/24 | 13 | 10 | 3 |
| 9/6/24 | 12 | 9 | 3 |
| Average: | 12.88 | 10.75 | 2.13 |
With a 16oz Cafe Latte making you cough up $4, after a couple of semesters of five coffees a week you’ll lose, according to my testing, about 500oz of coffee or about $150.
A perfect study would have over a thousand responses, but I am only one man dividing his caffeine addiction between coffee and Redbull, but in my limited testing period, I never received a 16oz coffee.
After confirming my suspicions I jumped on the ol’ internet and did some looking for answers, but a deep dive into Google searches, Reddit forums, and Quora discussions only left me with more questions. One of the common themes was the foam, an angry barista would always comment that the foam sinks and that’s why the cup isn’t full, but if that were the case the amount of the actual liquid coffee would be consistent across every cup, but that can’t be said for my findings, ranging from 12oz to 14.5oz, zero consistency.
This whole experiment may seem petty and trivial and sound like the rantings of a deranged overcaffeinated brat, but I disagree. This is part of a much larger problem that affects every consumer: companies taking advantage of their customers.
In this ever more expensive world, it becomes clearer by the day that consumers are getting the short end of the stick. Rising prices and smaller products make a college student’s limited income worth less and less every year, and it goes further than just my coffee stop; our beloved Beanery changed the everyday happy hour to Tuesdays and Thursdays, the dollar menu from McDonald’s used to be a staple of quick cheap food, but has been transformed into the 1, 2, and 3 dollar menu, Pizza Hut’s $10 Large three-topping pizza, has been replaced by a one-topping pizza, and the beloved $5 foot-long Subway sandwich will now ring you up around 10 bucks. All once staples of quick cheap and easy meals now cost you almost double what they did 10 years ago.
Everywhere you look prices are going up and products are shrinking, but there’s not much I can do about it. I’m still going to buy coffee, and I can promise you there will be multiple Quarter Pounders with Cheese in my future, all I can do is urge you to be aware. Don’t be Ignorant, check prices, don’t just swipe a card and forget about it.
