Yesterday was National Coffee Day, tomorrow International Coffee Day. And in the spirit of big reveals, I’m going to speak my truth into the ether to see how it floats. I kind of hate National Coffee Day. I know it’s probably supposed to be some sort of high holiday for me—and I’ve probably referred to it as such when I was of a gentler humor—but each and every National Coffee Day sends me into a fit of howling fantods. It’s a fake holiday, a fugazi, there’s no Gregorian underpinning for why National Coffee Day occurs when it does. No one knows how all of this got started—the first organized national Coffee Day on record took place in Japan in 1983 and the first American mention wasn’t until 2005—and I’m sure the beginnings were well intentioned, but this current iteration is grotesque reminder of the at-large perception of coffee merely as a commodity.
Being in the coffee business—especially the coffee news business—National Coffee Day is an unavoidable phenomenon. Around this time every year my inbox gets flooded with “hot coffee deals” or “where to get free coffee” and clickbaity stories about best coffee shops or brewers, crystallizing what this holiday is actually all about. It’s a day of commerce and traffic, a red-inked circle on the corporate calendar to remind them to dangle the discount carrot in front of our noses.
But coffee’s reality is the exact opposite: it should be more expensive. The bargain pushing perpetuates the notion that a coffee is a coffee is a coffee, a nuanceless monolith of a crop, and that a cup of joe should be a buck. When in fact coffee prices have stagnated greatly despite the cost of just about everything else going up. Prices have been kept immorally low for so long that we feel entitled to them and any efforts to course correct is met with fierce resistance. (The price on the C-market has finally started trending the right direction, thanks to global warming-induced scarcity—or traders’ fears thereof—and everything is throwing a shit fit about it.)
It’s near impossible to give a name to what exactly it is that National Coffee Day celebrates. It’s not baristas or producers, nor is it roasters or importers or pickers or processors or coffee shops even. Much in the same way bad coffee doesn’t really taste like anything, has no perceivable florality or fruit notes or sweetness beyond general coffeeness, so too does National Coffee Day, which shapelessly celebrates coffee. It gestures at a beloved thing, like saying “two Corinthians,” but without the first notion of why it beloved or what it even means. This is because the goal is to sell, not celebrate. The whole thing feels manufactured, as though the primary beneficiary of National Coffee Day is actually the PR firms who use it as an excuse to argue for their own necessity and ensure another month of billings, while flooding my inbox (and that of every other journalist who has ever written a food or beverage story) with emails we ignore.
I’m not going to go as far as to say that there shouldn’t be a National Coffee Day, or that we don’t need one, because actually we should treat every day as National Coffee Day. Even for things that are important to us and that we interact with on a daily basis, it’s good to have an annual reminder of why they matter. It’s why we celebrate birthdays and anniversaries, it’s why parents and grandparents get a day and why there are spots on the calendar to remember graver moments in history in hopes that they don’t bear repeating. Having one day a year to reflect on a beverage you care enough to read about on the internet is certainly worthwhile.
And if you want to make that day matter in some real, tangible way, go to your favorite coffee shop and treat yourself. Or go try the new mom-and-pop cafe you heard about. Tip your barista a little bit extra. Make it a day of service—a day of tipping very well for service, that is. Buy that fancier bag of coffee that both producer and roaster took great risk to make happen. Make coffee at home and allow yourself five minutes to do nothing but sit and appreciate what it is you are drinking. Do whatever it is that you love about coffee and do it fully, to the betterment of those that make it possible. That, to me, would be a happy National Coffee Day.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
