How much does a cup of coffee cost in a Madrid café?

How to get close to this number

Read the question rather than the slug: it asks the price of a coffee in a Madrid café. Anchor on a northern European capital and adjust down — the explanation puts it at roughly half what the same drink costs in Paris or London.

The reason is the density from the restaurants question on this site: the highest bar density in the European Union. Intense local competition, small premises, high turnover and a culture of short standing visits all push the price down, and a café that sells two hundred coffees a day can charge less per cup than one that sells forty.

The cultural consequence is that the price sustains the habit. A coffee cheap enough to have several times a day is a different social object from one priced as a treat — it makes the bar a place you pass through rather than a destination, which is exactly what the density figure describes from the other side.