I frequently deal with customers making comments about the prices that I charge them for food and drinks, as though they weren’t aware then there is a fucking big fuck off menu that they can see quite clearly. I’m sure most people who have worked any sort of job which involves dealing with customers can relate when I say that I have heard every “joke” a customer is likely to make about the prices (or anything else, really).
Yesterday I had a really great customer. And by great I mean he was a fucking dickhead.
He came up and ordered two hot chocolates. The menu which is quite easy to see and also read clearly says “Hot Chocolate - $3.60”. Now, I’ll try and go through this slowly…
Hot Chocolates are $3.60 each. He ordered two. That comes to a total of $7.20. I could work that out in my head quicker than I could punch it into the till.
“What!?” this guy responds with an indignant tone and begins to say numerous things that I didn’t care to hear about how expensive it is.
I really didn’t want to hear about it and this guy was a cock and was greeted with a blank if not annoyed stare. He pretty quickly realised that I did not want to hear anything he had to say about the prices and even said “I bet you get this all the time, don’t you?”
Yes, I fucking do.
I explained that to him and it seemed as though he understood that he should shut the fuck up, and then said something about taking out a mortgage before coming back because he just did not fucking get it.
Now, this is something reasonably trivial and anyone who still reads the front page and not just the forum is probably thinking “Why are you bothering?”
Well, it is because one of the things he said during his initial whinge.
“$7.20? I’d expect a gold plated cup for that!”
This struck me as quite odd so I thought I might work it out. Unfortunately I don’t have one of the cups that we serve hot chocolates in, so I have to guess how big they are. We serve regular coffee and hot chocolates in the same size cup as you would expect a regular coffee to be in at your average cafe. However, I will approximate.
Let us approximate that the cup is a cylinder of height 8cm and diameter 4cm:
Now, remember that the top is open and the bottom is not. The surface area consists of the surface area of the cylinder, inside and out, and the area of the circle which is the bottom of the cup, inside and out.
The area of the cylinder is:
The area of the circle is:
The area of the cup is:
Assuming a coating of 0.5 microns:
The density of gold is 19.3 g/cc:
According to goldprice.org the value of gold is $26.86/g:
So the gold alone required to plate ONE cup which is smaller than what we use would cost more than one and a half times what it costs for a single hot chocolate. This is the cost of the gold alone and ignores several factors including, but not limited to:
- The cost of the original hot chocolate
- The cost of the plating process
- The fact that you couldn't gold plate a carboard cup
I know he ordered two hot chocolates but he said "I'd expect a gold plated cup for that", which implies he would want a single gold plated cup when he ordered two hot chocolates. He did not specify if he expected to get one of the hot chocolates in the gold plated cup or if it was supposed to be a seperate third cup which should accompany his order which would further increase the overall cost. He also mentioned that he was expecting it to cost "around $5" - despite the menu clearly stating the price - which is less than the cost of the amount of gold required to coat a single cup.