The Price of a Cup Went Up, and Still People Came | Cafes in Japan Today

The price of a cup of coffee has certainly risen over the past few years. Even so, sales at cafes and coffee shops have not fallen.

Market scale

The market size of the coffee shop industry is generally above 1 trillion yen, and in normal times it has remained almost flat between 1 and 1.2 trillion yen. It is not large within the overall dining-out industry, but it has been a steadily existing market.

Sales are growing

According to the Japan Foodservice Association’s "Market Trend Survey of the Food Services Industry," from the second half of 2024 through early 2025, there were several months when sales in the cafe and coffee shop category were around 105-110% compared with the same month of the previous year.

What is interesting is what lies inside those numbers. From 2022 to 2024, many chains raised prices for coffee and food in stages. As a result, a pattern emerged in which spending per customer rose, offsetting a slight decrease in customer numbers and pushing up sales became the structure.

What are people buying?

What we can read from this is that even when prices rise, people have other reasons to keep going. What is being bought at cafes may not be coffee itself alone, but the time spent sitting there, or a place that is neither home nor work. The reason customer numbers did not collapse sharply in response to price increases may be that the value of that part did not change.

There are markets where people keep coming even when prices rise, and markets where they stop coming. The difference may lie in how we define what people are buying at that shop.

For movements in international market prices, see the article on coffee prices for details.

Reference: Japan Foodservice Association, “Market Trend Survey of the Food Service Industry”

—The Value Village Editorial Team