I did some math at the coffee shop this week. Bear with me — I promise it starts cozy.
Tuesday morning, corner table, the one by the window where the light comes in sideways and makes everyone look like a painting. I had my planner out and my second-favorite scarf on (the gray one with the fringe that’s slowly unraveling, which I refuse to fix because I like watching it go). And I decided, just for fun, to keep a tally of every transaction I saw.
The register rang up maybe fifteen of them in the hour I sat there. Lattes, muffins, one enormous cinnamon roll that a man in a Steelers hoodie carried away like a trophy.
But my receipt-back tally had forty-some entries, and most of them never went near the register. A woman held the door for a man with a stroller. The barista had a regular’s order started before he reached the counter — you could watch his whole morning improve in real time. Somebody left a paperback on the free shelf. Somebody took one. A teenager patiently walked a gentleman through connecting to “the wifi machine.” Two strangers agreed the weather was doing something, which is how strangers in Pennsylvania say I see you, fellow traveler.
Then I did the second bit of math, and this is where my mug went cold.
My latte was $5.25. I got curious about where that goes, so I looked it up later, and friends, it’s a longer receipt than you’d think. The farmer who grew the beans — the person who actually made the coffee exist — gets somewhere around a dime of it. A dime. The roaster gets a slice, the shop gets a slice, the barista gets her wage out of the shop’s slice. Fair enough so far; all of those people did something I can point to.
But there’s a whole crowd between the farmer’s dime and my $5.25 that I couldn’t explain to you. The trading company that bought the beans and sold them without ever touching them. The company that bought that company, which owes interest to a bank, which is why the prices went up in March. The card company that takes its little percentage of every single tap — a toll booth on a road they didn’t build. Somewhere out there, someone I will never meet made money Tuesday betting on whether coffee prices would rise, and he has never held a coffee bean in his life, and his cut was bigger than the farmer’s.
I sat with that a while. Every dollar I handed over had all those hands in it before it got anywhere useful. And I started noticing the same crowd everywhere once I looked — in my rent, in my groceries, in the fee to pay a fee. So many people collecting a toll on work that other people did.
And then I looked back at my tally, and here’s what got me.
The forty-some transactions that never touched the register? Nobody skimmed those. The door got held at full value. The paperback traveled from one reader to the next with no shipping surcharge, no interest, no toll booth. The teenager’s wifi lesson arrived one hundred percent intact. That whole economy — and it is an economy, it moves real value between real people all day long — runs with zero hands in the till.
Which makes me think the coziest thing we can do for each other is also a little bit sneaky: move more of our lives into the economy nobody can skim.
Trade tomatoes over the fence. Swap babysitting instead of hiring it. Fix your neighbor’s leaky faucet and let him sharpen your knives. Use the free shelf, the tool library, the church basement clothing swap. Buy from the farm stand where your dollar goes from your hand into the hand of the person who grew the thing, one step, no crowd. Every time value moves directly between neighbors, everybody in that in-between crowd goes home empty-handed, and the whole exchange stays exactly as big as the work that made it.
So here’s my homework for the week, if you want it: make one trade that never touches a register. Just one. See how it feels to hand somebody full value and get full value back.
I suspect it feels like being remembered by your barista.
Small joys are big deals. Especially the ones nobody can take a cut of.
Stay clean, stay kind, stay caffeinated. 🧣☕
— Miss Ordinary
