Ask HN: Why do we drink coffee?
Caffeine is the first thing I think of when I hear the word "coffee". Is that why we tend to drink it though? Let's create a thought experiment:
Product: average cup of coffee
Cup size: 8oz
Caffeine amount: ~95mg
Price: ~$2.50 USD
For fun, let's now double our cup size to be around 16oz, rough the caffeine amount to be ~200mg, and call it the average coffee drinker's cup size in the morning. These numbers are a rough estimate. Focus on what we are after here, not the average coffee drinker cup size per se.
If our sole purpose of drinking coffee were for ingesting caffeine, we are not being as efficient as we could be. Caffeine tablets are on the market. Here is what I found at my local grocery store:
Product: box of caffeine tablets - 40 count
Caffeine amount per tablet: 200mg
Total price: $8.29 USD
Price per tablet: $0.21 USD
If our sole goal here is caffeine intake, we just now found an alternative for caffeine ingestion for $0.21 USD per 200mg of caffeine, or one tablet in this case. Now we are being more efficient.
Now think of all of your typical morning interactions where you and others may be drinking coffee and replace that mental visual with all of you ingesting caffeine tablets instead. That picture does not look right to me. It would be and feel weird, would it not?
So why do we really drink coffee? Is it more than just for caffeine? It is for social acceptance? Is it a preconditioned cognitive response? Is it something else entirely?
What do you think?