This Is the Worst American City to Buy a Cup of Coffee

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Feb 23, 12:37PM EST · Published Feb 18, 7:30AM EST

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This Is the Worst American City to Buy a Cup of Coffee — © Julius Schorzman / Wikimedia Commons

The average coffee drinker in America consumes three cups a day. The coffee market totals about $18 billion. That figure may well be too low. Starbuck’s revenue last year was $30 billion.

Coffee drinks come in all sorts of containers and flavors. A cup can cost as little as a few cents to make. Buying a Starbucks coffee can cost $5. That has not blunted traffic to America’s largest coffee store chain. In fact, there are over 37,000 coffee shops in the United States. From the nearest corner Starbucks to the French patisserie, coffee lovers have loads of coffee vendors to choose from. Yet, the price of a cup of coffee can vary widely from shop to shop and from city to city.

To determine America’s worst city for coffee-lovers, 24/7 Tempo reviewed The Best Coffee Cities in America: 2022 Data report from Clever Real Estate, a real estate agent matching service.

The nation’s 50 most populous metropolitan areas were ranked on criteria including the average reported price of a cappuccino, the number of coffee shops per 100,000 residents and the price of a daily cappuccino as a percentage of average income. The number of coffee shops per square mile and the Google Trends search volume for several coffee-related terms in each city were also considered. Population and income data came from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey for 2019.
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The results show that many of the worst cities to buy a cup of coffee are in the South, while the West Coast, Great Lakes and New England are home to some of the best coffee cities in the nation. Cities on the bottom of the list generally have fewer places to get coffee and the coffee is more expensive.

The worst city to buy a cup of coffee in is Virginia Beach, Virginia. Here are the details:

Average coffee price: $5.39
Average annual coffee cost: $1,401 (2.6% of annual income)
Coffee shops per capita: 12
Population: 1,765,031

Click here to see all the best and worst cities to buy a cup of coffee.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.