Selling Coffee At EV Charging Stations?
Lowering prices, helping customers, and doing the Right Thing™️.
If you’ve ever charged your EV at a public charging station or just driven past one thoughtfully as I do from time to time it probably² had a convenience store or coffee shop attached to it where you can pass your charging time using the facilities, drinking coffee, and eating various types of cake¹.
Unfortunately, as with many things in the modern world, retailers setting up shop at such locations often treat the users as a captive market (spoiler: they are, unless there are other shops already nearby) and tend to squeeze them via aggressively jacked up pricing until their collective pips start squeaking and everyone wonders where the noise is coming from.
It’s a double whammy, to coin an old phrase, as public charging stations already tend to have much higher price per kWh than home chargers due to the corresponding owner recouping their own costs, putting a percentage of top of the price they’re paying for electricity themselves as a result of basic capitalism (this is allowed as it’s what we all do in business after all), and once again taking full and indiscriminate advantage of the captive market involved (this isn’t such a good thing and strikes me as alarmingly predatory).
