People make the choice to buy overpriced coffee at places like Starbucks. The excuse "I'm too tired to make my own coffee" is just ridiculous.

Why would I be outraged at things I can easily avoid if I want to? If I wanted to complain about prices it'd be at spring events and concerts. I can typically buy a 6 pack for the cost of 1 beer.

I can understand a service getting more expensive at certain times as demand increases.

Has the price changed more for me than someone else?

Did the price change after my decision to purchase?

These would make me angry.

I live rurally (no Starbucks), but recently had to catch a train from Edinburgh for the second leg of a family holiday. It was delayed by an hour and was raining, so we went into the nearby Starbucks. 2 small hot chocolates for the kids and 1 coffee for my wife and I was down £23. I was caught in the slipstream and stressed so didn't have time to process how much this would cost. We could have got a bag of snacks and drinks for the journey for half that. Robbing bastards.

Time is money.

It's not like expensive convenience has a monopoly. If you don't want to pay more, do it yourself.

I boycott things all the time. I also have friends who seem to not care at all. One of my friends considers herself really politically minded, but still eats at McDonald's, gets her daily Starbucks, orders on Amazon, shops and target and uses ChatGPT as her therapist. I've tried to point out the irony, but she gets incredibly defensive. I think some people don't care about anything but convenience. In this day and age, with social media, it made everyone the star of their own personal movie in their head. If things don't directly impact them, even if they like to talk the talk, they're not willing to walk the walk.

One possible factor is the fact that some people call it “convenience pricing”. That phrase is doing a lot of psychological work. If we called it something like “surveillance pricing” or “extractive pricing”, then maybe we would be closer to outrage.

There must be an upper limit for how many things an individual can feel outraged about simultaneously. For me that limit is zero.