Medium and value of a coffee cup

Medium

What is a coffee cup made of ?

There is not a universal composition for coffee cups, there are various materials to make them. The most commonly used is porcelain (example). It is often used for coffee cups because of its properties. Indeed, porcelain has the particularity to keep the hotness of the liquid that it contains, and God knows how awful cold coffee is. Stainless steel is also a possibility (example). It has the same property about hotness. But those two have the problem to burn your fingers whenever you try to hold them. You might also use glass, which has the same problem has porcelain, being fragile, or plastic, which is bad to keep the hotness of your drink.

However, today, scientists try to innovate and to find new materials for coffee cups, materials without those issues. Insulating plastic is being more and more used, for its ability to keep your coffee perfectly hot for a quite important amount of time without setting fire to your hands. Some also use borosilicate glass, which is a type of glass that is much more resistant to hotness, and is normally used in the nuclear industry.

To sum up, if I were God, I would have plenty of choices to make a coffee cup. I would have to get only one material, among those given before, and give it a specific shape, so that it could contain a liquid, without forgetting a crucial part: putting a handle on that cup.

Value

Consequently, the value of a coffee cup can be very different from one cup to another.

In most cases, for a set of 6 cups of an acceptable quality, in porcelain, you will pay between 10 and 20 euros. For a set of 6 cups in stainless steel, the prices are in the same area, like for the glass cups.

However, plastic cups, basic plastic, are much more cheaper, not more than 5 euros for a set of 50, but those are disposable cups, in contrast to those in porcelain or steel. If you wish to get a borosilicate glass cup, it will be more expensive, as the range of price goes from 20 to 60 euros for a set of 6.

But even if those prices seem already quite important, they are not the highest. Indeed, Villeroy and Boch proposes a set of 6 porcelain cups at 130 euros, because they are “new wave”. Also, Fusion proposes a set of 6 glass cups at the incredible price of 200 euros, this time because they're “design”. The aspect of the cup is, today, none of my business, but mine is to notice that this kind of cup is up to 10 times more expensive than basic glass or porcelain cups.

As for the industry of the coffee cup, any company might sell some, from the coffee company to the decoration company, as it is not complicated to do and does not require any scarce or specific materials.

To conclude, let me say that the value of such an object can not be measured only with euros. Indeed, I won't spoil the significance part, but some people are such a relationship with coffee that they value their coffee cups even more than their parents.