I was hugely excited to hear that a café in London is now serving a £15 cup of coffee; though not as excited as I would have been had I been one of the many London journalists asked to sample it. Perhaps this is a new business model for cafés: create something so preposterously expensive that journalists have to come to test it out. That’s got to keep the cash rolling in.
Then, in about a month or two, when all the world’s hacks have tired of tasting the £15 brew, the café can come up with a new one for £25 and start the process all over again. Seriously, this is the future — media services. “Need a story — come on down to our restaurant, we are selling pork scratchings at £50 a bag.”
Clearly the real pay dirt is if you can get a TV crew interested; that’s about three people each needing to gulp down a £15 coffee from the plains of Yemen. Then, obviously, you will want to buy a few more cups to test on passers-by for the prestige 10.20pm slot on the nightly news. Of course, the screamingly expensive coffee is just the one that garners all the publicity and pulls in the self-selecting aficionados. Regular punters can get a shot of house joe for the bargain price of £3.50.
