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Comment by jcbrand | Hacker News Reader

> At 9:27, once I’ve brushed my teeth, answered a few messages, and wiped the sleep from my eyes, I order a coffee through WeChat. There’s a payments window on the app, and when you click on it you see various options, some proprietary to WeChat and some which are independent apps that run on WeChat’s platform. I open the Meituan delivery app and scroll through all the coffee options around me. I order an Americano. I have my WeChat linked with the facial recognition scanner on my iPhone; when I pay, I just hold my phone up to my face and a green tick flicks across the screen. Seven minutes later, I get a message telling me the coffee is on the way, with the name and number of the delivery driver. It arrives at 9:53.

Is it too much effort to just make your own coffee in your own apartment? Does that now also have to be delivered to you? The amount of waste involved in this just boggles my mind.

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>Is it too much effort to just make your own coffee in your own apartment? Does that now also have to be delivered to you? The amount of waste involved in this just boggles my mind.

Not from China but have been different phases of life where have either preferred to have early morning coffe delivered/fetched/made myself in my apartment. Different priorities would drove the choices for me. Pricing differences between walking-fetching and having it delivered it on a schedule to my place were not much. Making it often required me to maintain a lot of things , which i preferred depending on place, nature of work besides other priorities.

I’m curious, do people even enjoying drinking nice / real coffee anymore when drinking from Starbucks or have it delivered and sipping it at your desk or in the elevator, or is this just some kind of habit like smoking?

Why not just wash down a caffeine pill with warm glass of water for the kick and move when time pressed?

Maybe they think it tastes good?

I might do that if companies started putting pills in the break room instead of Keurig. I consider coffee and cream a benefit like health care at this point.

You would get a resistance not too long after. I quit caffeine pills because even if I only ever took them once a week they would do nothing but have bad sideeffects. Now I take 5 hour energies/redbulls or else I feel tired by noon after sleeping for 13 hours.

Not sure what coffee shops you have near you but the ones where I live have better coffee than most people have at home.

That's not a particularly hard problem to solve. Buy good roasted beans, a grinder, and basically any coffee pot. Grinding your own beans before brewing makes a big difference vs. brewing a pot of Folgers.

That does of course assume the ability to buy good roasted beans somewhere relatively near you.

If such a pill was ever created, I surmise that the coffee industry would collapse overnight.

You can get 120 pills of 100mg of caffeine for $6 including shipping "Jet-Alert 100 MG Each Caffeine Tab 120 Count". There are fancier ones that include L-Theanine (found in green tea) to mellow the caffeine jitters out but those are significantly more expensive.

You used to be able to buy a half kilo brick of caffeine on prime for like $30.

That's enough caffeine to give you a heart attack 100 times over, it would last you forever.

It didn't affect the coffee industry because drinking coffee is an enjoyable process, not a one dimensional addiction around caffeine

> it would last you forever

Can confirm. Bought two in 2013, still have ~450 grams in the first bag I opened. Well worth the ~$50 (including a jeweler's scale) for a lifetime supply of preworkout supplements.

The FDA banned bulk caffeine sales in 2015[1] or 2018[2] too. This is probably a good idea, most folks have no idea how much caffeine is in a cup of coffee, much less how to measure that dose in powdered form.

[1] https://www.fda.gov/food/dietary-supplement-products-ingredi... [2] https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-take...

"if I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water"

From 'The Little Prince' referring to the merchant who sold pills to quench thirst.

It's somewhere in between for me, as someone who drinks coffee from a coffee shop almost every day. I crave a good cup of coffee often but when I get it I often just start drinking it and when it's gone I realize I forgot to savor the experience, or I do try to savor the experience but realize the work I did or the article I read or the thoughts I had while drinking it were disappointing. When things align I do still enjoy my coffee very much though. Probably a couple times a week.

It’s a habit and an addiction. But among the available addictions it’s one of the best.

People have told me that, for them, if they don't get their morning coffee that get symptoms like headaches. For me, it's mostly just a habit to have tea or coffee in the morning and relax before starting real work. I like it, but if I'm traveling and there's a line out the door at Starbucks or Dunkin' Donuts, I'll probably just walk on past. I don't really care that much.

>But among the available addictions it’s one of the best.

Why do you feel that way? I've never been a big coffee drinker (for this reason specifically), but everything I've heard about caffeine withdrawals for people who have been daily drinkers for a while is that they are awful - headaches, irritability, extreme fatigue, etc...

The withdrawals are unpleasant but certainly manageable. A good week and you're effectively detoxxed, two and your brain is reset. Moreover, as long as you refrain from adding sugar/sweetener to your coffee it's closer to a benign habit than an addiction, as black coffee has little to no downsides if your heart is ok.

This is coming from a pot/day drinker who's 'quit' multiple times. In the end it's not worth it, because coffee also comes with the pleasant social contract with other coffee drinkers as well as a appetite suppressing effect.

Coffee helps me with fasting. It turns what is a semi uncomfortable experience to an easy thing.

I love a regular serving of six cups of almost dark coffee. I can't stand real sweet foods as my sense of taste is overwhelmingly strong (yeah I have sensory issues, it's part of life for me).

I drink Dunkin' Donuts coffee because I don't give a damn about the taste and it's cheap. I like the process of drinking coffee... it's a habit of sorts. Not so much an addiction as I have no problems going without coffee.

May I then suggest drinking water instead? It's healthier and even cheaper.

Coffee isn't a replacement for water. You would still drink water (I hope).

Coffee (with no milk or sugar) is actually really healthy. It has practically no calories, is high in antioxidants, and feels filling (so you might eat less and thus consume fewer calories). Studies have also linked it to higher longevity and reduced risk of heart disease, liver failure, and Alzheimer's.

It's when you get a grande vanilla latte from Starbucks that you load up on milk, sugar, and caffeine.

Funny, I'm a huge coffee drinker and prefer Dunkin' because it's really good.

I do. Every morning I get the scale out, grind beans, and get the kettle going to prepare a couple of cups of pour-over coffee. I'm still dialing in the perfect pot of coffee, so I'll change a variable in my process each morning. If I time it right, I make my pour over in time to sit down by some natural light and remotely attend my morning meetings as I sip down my beverage. It gives me a nice break from the screen and allows me to focus on doing something highly rewarding with my hands.

As a side note, I've recently started ordering bags of beans online from various roasters I've had around the country. If anyone has recommendations that sell their beans online, I'd love to expand my palette.

I'm still dialing in the perfect pot of coffee, so I'll change a variable in my process each morning.

Aeropress is highly conducive to repeatability and experimentation, due to its tight control of the immersion time interval. I was trying to be careful with pour-over, and still found that I couldn't quite get it down. Now, I can even adjust for the age of the beans I have on hand. (You can go hotter and briefer, to get the caffeine and good stuff, but absorb extracting unpleasant stuff.) Do read and follow the instructions to start.

One big disadvantage is that the filters absorb the oils, but all brewing methods that use filters have this. Also, it uses a lot of grounds to produce a little bit of extract. (Which I dilute and drink as Americano.)

I like coffee. I like the variety of flavors and smells and the warmth and the ritual of it. I roast my own beans nearly every day. I also am addicted to caffeine. For me, there is a sliding scale of preference from my own coffee or sitting down at a good coffee shop to something quick like a Starbucks to instant coffee or caffeine pills, but pretty much no matter what I have a plan or backup plan to at least get some caffeine in the system.

That said, delivery seems a little strange to me. You don't get the little coffee break to walk to somewhere or have some involvement in making it, which seems like a downside. It also seems like a lot of overhead to obtain coffee.

Uh... What?

It's the reason Starbucks exists. People are on the go, and they don't want to make their own coffee.

This is literally the same as going to the corner coffee shop to buy a Frappuccino.

Going to Starbucks is not the same as having coffee delivered to your home, especially not if you walk there.

In China everything is delivered by electric scooters, delivery people get paid for it, more coffee shops can survive because otherwise they would have to provide more space which is very expensive, and most coffee is delivered in a paper bag with a paper cup stand.

The paper cup won't be recycled though, and electricity isn't pulled from thin air.

If you went to the coffee shop yourself, it would probably be on your own electric scooter anyway. And you'd take your coffee away in the same paper cup.

You could use a reusable cup.

No reason the delivery couldn't also be delivered in a reusable container, to your own cup

Step by step, my friend. We cannot expect the whole industry to shift overnight, but the shift to more paper bags, recycling, renewable energy is happening in China right now. Tier 1 cities are very tough on recycling right now, and most residential complexes had set up very good recycling guidelines since ~March, which are, surprisingly, followed by local residents. Next year they're opening a new nuclear plant nearby, and some wind turbines are being set up now along the coast. One step at a time.

Paper bag... Not always. Coffeebox deliver it in a giant cardboard gift box surrounded by reflective thermal bubble wrap. Felt like I was paying more for the packaging than the coffee... Luckin I suppose do go for the paper bag and pay a fortune for immediate delivery to ShunFeng. The joys of VC funded coffee businesses I suppose...

FWIW they probably pay 4-6 rmb to SF. Their rates for commercial customers are much lower than for individual customers. Given the high rent, I bet this is still more efficient for them than running a 500+ sqm joint like Starbucks.

If the corner coffee shops took 26 minutes to get me a cup of coffee I'd probably have to give it up entirely if I was really too lazy to spend the 90 seconds of effort in my kitchen that gives me a cup of coffee in about 5 minutes.

> It arrives at 9:53

If you can count on that arrival time (within minutes), you can just time it so it coincides with you getting out the door. No need to worry about forgetting the pot on the stove, or noisy grinders, etc. It's more likely you'll make a mistake in the morning especially if you're not a morning person and you're still half asleep and in a hurry.

There's something for everyone.

This is why coffee machines with timers were invented.

5 min before I go to bed, all I have to do is prepare the coffee and pour water, then press the button to activate at the preferred time interval. At 7:15 am the machine will start and there we go, coffee ready. The machine also turns itself off within 45 min, so you never risk leaving anything running.

It's very easy to spend 15 minutes every time you go to Starbucks. It's not my thing (I mostly drink free coffee at work, from my espresso machine at home, choose other coffee shops, or if I must use Starbucks, I place a mobile order). But the lines tend to be very long, and it takes a long time to get a beverage. I guess people don't mind it because it's a part of the day, a break, a 'treat'. I find it a hassle, but in a way if it's part of your 30 minute coffee break from work, maybe it's not so bad.

Cmon cmon, in nyc people have been calling the bodega to order anything and everything for decades, including single cups of tea.

Yep, Chengdu is a huge, dense city, with about 10 million people.

Now I'm feeling nostalgic, I was only there for a few weeks, but with the parks, teahouses, and food, it was my favorite city in China.

WeChat basically created a platform, allows third party apps to have their html5 version of app in WeChat platform. Basically the same as Google Login. You can choose to use their independent version of app directly to do the same thing. WeChat is very successful on this platform, I can imagine future phones just need WeChat to work properly and all the apps in it will function. Those apps are not WeChat or Tencent apps though, just web apps work inside WeChat.

Lol.Those poor people tracking him on behalf of the CPC on Wechat must be also making the same assumption, but they have bills to pay :D

> Is it too much effort to just make your own coffee in your own apartment?

Don't even need extra equipment. Trader Joe's has a nice cold-brew. Pour a finger width into a cup, add some almond/coconut milk, then put in the microwave for ~60 seconds. Hot vitamin-c in under two minutes. No way I could wait almost thirty.

Even worse, could you maybe leave your room and go get a coffee? It literally would've taken you the same amount of time if you did just that depending on how close the coffee place is, and I would guess it isn't far.

Yeah, 26 minute turnaround for coffee is pretty damn shit, even by starbucks standards, but I expect the novelty of getting coffee delivered is sufficient to keep something this ridiculous on the market.

Absolutely right, people need to get up off their asses (sorry) if they want coffee.

The author also waited 25 minutes for a coffe; it takes 2 with a moka, half with a coffee machine.

2 minutes with a moka? I seriously need to step up my game.

1 minute: hang grind fresh beans

1 minute: take out moka pot, fill with water, put coffee in, put on stove

3-6 minutes depending on ambient temp: moka boils

1 minute: pour cup, wash out moka pot

Moka is such a pain. I drip now for time efficiency.

I have way too many coffee makers of various types at home. I always seem to end up circling back to electric drip. Fewest actions and least manual intervention of any approach first thing in the morning. (I don't really like Keurig and it's pretty wasteful--and I generally want more than one cup anyway.)

Drip is also the most consistent way to brew coffee.

If you can afford it and care about grind quality, there are much quicker grinders out there.

The Baratza Sette 270 grinds with fantastic precision compared to other grinders on the market (even the Vario), and goes through 19g of beans in about 5 seconds.

I currently use a hario hand grinder (ceramic bur). I imagine the grind consistency improves with an electric, but I’m curious if it has a noticeable effect taste wise.

You can buy ground coffee, if efficiency is your concern.

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