© 2025 WFAE

Mailing Address:
WFAE 90.7
P.O. Box 896890
Charlotte, NC 28289-6890
Tax ID: 56-1803808
90.7 Charlotte 93.7 Southern Pines 90.3 Hickory 106.1 Laurinburg
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Coffee? Thank U, Next

JOAQUIN SARMIENTO
/
JOAQUIN SARMIENTO/AFP

There's a price problem brewing in the coffee industry. Farmers are getting less for their coffee beans, so you'd think we'd be paying less for coffee. But coffee prices at places like Starbucks and other coffee shops have been increasing.

That pricing disconnect comes from a lot of moving parts in the industry. For example, there's an oversupply of coffee beans, and industry-wide moves towards less coffee-reliant drinks, like pumpkin spice lattes or Ariana Grande's "cloud macchiato." Today on The Indicator, how that squares for coffee drinkers.

Music by . Find us: Twitter / Facebook .

Subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts , PocketCasts and NPR One .

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Stacey Vanek Smith is the co-host of NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money. She's also a correspondent for Planet Money, where she covers business and economics. In this role, Smith has followed economic stories down the muddy back roads of Oklahoma to buy 100 barrels of oil; she's traveled to Pune, India, to track down the man who pitched the country's dramatic currency devaluation to the prime minister; and she's spoken with a North Korean woman who made a small fortune smuggling artificial sweetener in from China.
Sally Herships