Dave is correct: Starbucks is gouging its customers. And the price of soy is now 0.50$!

according to http://www.ochef.com/254.htm soy milk should be used within 5 days of opening, supporting your argument that soy does need some “care and feeding”. my wife uses soy at home & i will just say i’ve never seen a container go bad.

i stand by my assertion that overall costs are less for serving soy vs. milk & that starbucks is pricing due to what the market will bear and enjoys large margins on this “soy tax”. i prefer not to think of my post as whining, though… :) it’s a simple request for starbucks to be honest and not come up with fake reasons for the surcharge. let’s just call a spaid a spaid…

by your logic they should introduce different pricing schemes for non-fat, 2% and whole milk since each of these requires different containers and approaches.

also, you certainly are correct that starbucks negotiates volume pricing – principally for coffee but for milk (soy or cow) as well – that pricing, while certainly not publically available regardless of the research effort, should be substantially lower than what an everyday consumer would find at a grocery store. and yes that will affect the margin calculation – but the net result will still be pretty sweet for Starbucks.

For stocking, sure, unopened soy milk is fine on the shelf for many months, but after opened, it goes bad just like real milk. Even the most lightly trafficked Starbucks will go through gallons of milk every day, but not nearly as much soy milk, so there’s a much greater likelihood of soy milk going bad (and hence waste and higher cost).

For production, while the steaming process is the same for soy milk and regular milk, there’s more to it than that. You know how the line in Starbucks gets long? (Can you sense the understatement?) It takes time to steam milk — that’s easily the single biggest bottleneck in making espresso drinks. With regular milk, they steam one big pitcher and can safely assume it will all get used, whereas keeping steamed soy milk hanging around will most likely be wasted, so it usually gets done on a one-off basis. This takes more time, and of course labor costs are the biggest expense in any food service company. It also increases the average wait time for customers, which reduces business.

Finally, you judge the cost based on what you as an average consumer can buy. Starbucks is not an average consumer; much like Wal-Mart (or any other big corporation), they can negotiate for better prices on items they buy a lot. Starbucks buys a lot of milk, but not so much soy milk, so the cost differential is greater than you presume.

I don’t mean to come off as rude, but a little knowledge and research would have told you all this; you obviously would prefer to spend your time whining than actually learning the facts. If you’re that concerned about your 40 cents, stop flocking to Starbucks with the rest of the sheep bleating “La-a-a-tte”.