‘Three euros for a small draft beer’: double the old price, according to a forum user

Three euros for a small draft beer: double the old price, according to a forum user

How much does a caña—a small draft beer—cost today in a neighbourhood bar? According to one poster, in the same area and the same type of venue where before the pandemic people paid between €1.40 and €1.60, the bill has reached €3. Double, with no free tapa and no price list in sight. The scene has served as more than a complaint: it has put a number on the feeling that going out for a drink has become a silent luxury, and it has exposed a rift between those who defend the new price and those who have decided never to pay it again.

From €1.40 to €3: how much the caña has gone up

The jump is not uniform. A 330ml bottle at €2.50 is considered expensive but explicable by the cost of the format; a 20cl caña at three euros finds no justification in the same reasoning. According to another forum user, in other neighbourhood bars a mediana—a medium draft beer—is served at €2.25 and the waiter asks the customer if it's okay before closing the tab. On the outskirts of Madrid, a jug of Amstel reached €4.50. And some maintain that a litre of beer in a bar has gone from €5 to €15 in three years.

Coffee trinc the same path: €1.75 for a coffee with milk in some venues in the centre, with torrefacto coffee in a glass at €1.70. Some have set themselves a personal limit of one euro and cut back from three or four coffees a day out to one a week. The supermarket alternative also has its figures: a cheap can is around €0.30, though a 330ml can is already approaching a euro. The saving exists, but it is paid for in bars and conversation.

Are bar costs enough to justify the price?

Here the real disagreement begins. A calculation repeated in the thread starts from the minimum wage: to cover one waiter's SMI—Spain's statutory minimum wage—you need to take at least €3,000 a month, that is, about a thousand cañas at three euros. Add to that the electricity bills of a venue with refrigerated cabinets, paper, cleaning the toilet and the daily wear and tear on a bar. On those figures, one poster argues, the business could even be losing money by charging three euros.

The objection is twofold. First, the absence of a price list: in neighbourhood bars, it is argued, the document does not even exist, despite the legal obligation to display prices that another part of the exchange recalls. Second, the effect on volume: if the price rises 40% and sales fall by two thirds, the result is not more cash but a kind of bar stagflation.

The customer who has decided to stop going

The consumer response is the variable that has changed most. Some admit they can perfectly well afford the three-euro caña and still refuse: it is not a question of capacity, it is the feeling of being taken for a fool. Others have moved their drinking home, with better-quality beers for the price of four mediocre rounds, or have sought fixed-price formats: half a litre for €1.50 in summer.

The adjustment has visible consequences. In some areas people talk of bars closing down. And an uncomfortable finding emerges for the hospitality trade: once someone gets used to not going, they discover that nothing happens, and the habit does not come back on its own. The detail of how that loss is shared between venue and customer—who gives in first, how much margin remains before prices are cut—is where the exchange becomes more interesting than it seems.

Why is everything going up at once?

There is an explanation that goes beyond the bar: the euro. The European currency was once exchanged at $1.60 and has fallen to parity, so that €2,000 today buys what €1,000 bought twenty years ago, according to the reasoning in circulation. Those who hold this reading point to money illusion: prices rise, wages do not keep up and the result is called relative impoverishment.

Against it is the thesis that the problem is not macroeconomic but structural: every product whose production, transport and distribution depends on regulated factors ends up getting more expensive, whether today because of a war or tomorrow because of oil. The comparison with cocaine—whose price, it is said, does not suffer from crises—works as a rhetorical argument, not as data.

Is the caña a national indicator?

The discussion drifts towards tourism and wages. One current argues for raising hospitality prices to European levels—€4 for a beer in northern countries—to stop attracting low-spending visitors and improve conditions in the sector. Another recalls that the low price was the sign of a country with low wages and that the hospitality sector is still weighed down by precarious pay.

Between both positions there remains an unresolved figure: the caña has become more expensive, the customer has begun to withdraw and the bar says it is not earning more. No one has managed to close that account. There remains the reasonable doubt whether the problem was the price of beer or the price of everything else.