The standard price for a cup of coffee in Italy is €1 (about £1), but in the UK you can be charged as much as £4. But why? The biggest part of the cost of serving a cup of coffee certainly isn’t the coffee. The most significant cost is staff wages, though in fact that’s not the key difference. It’s the difference in drinking culture that has the greatest effect on the difference of the price of a cup of coffee: British coffee drinkers spend far longer on a coffee than Italians, who order a coffee at the bar and drink it standing up, allowing Italian cafés to make more sales for the same costs. The opposite extreme is in Greece, where people sit over a single coffee for hours. As a result, Greece has some of the most expensive coffees in Europe, despite having lower wages.