You aren’t paying for the coffee, you are paying for the EXPERIENCE. The ENVIRONMENT… It’s a place to chill during the day, with an opportunity to meet new people, use free internet, get out of the house, meet clients/dates/friends in a neutral setting that is FAR cheaper than a restaurant… You think a business can do that by charging 50 cents a cup?
Starbucks (and other coffee shops) fill a NEED… It just doesn’t happen to be YOUR need. That doesn’t make me an idiot, it means I have different needs than you.
Now, even if someone is going in and out and just picking up coffee, it STILL fills a need: it lets everyone know that they can afford to spend $5 on a cup of coffee, implying wealth, discriminating taste and status. Kinda like people who drive German cars - they don’t need them, but they want to be perceived as having high status.
And sometimes they fool people who think that money = status, and those people treat them a certain way, thus fooling other people and giving them an artificially based ego boost, filling an emotional need.
So your point that people are idiots because they go to Starbucks is completely invalid. It would be only valid if we lived life in a vacuum as opposed to a social environment. Most of us stay out of the vacuum and enjoy it out here. Come on in, the water’s FINE…