+1 Interesting (15 Karma points are necessary to be able to mod, it seems)

Wow. And I thought the High Mountain Tea that my girlfriend is addicted to was expensive.

For about fourteen years we've been buying from https://eco-cha.com/collections/unroasted-taiwan-oolong-tea/products/li-shan-high-mountain-oolong-tea?variant=848393753 , but in the past few months the product hasn't had the proper fragrance. That's a massive problem for her quality of life, because like I said, it's an addiction. We're not sure if they're sourcing poor quality stock or it's been a bad tea season in Taiwan.

84 bucks for a third of a pound? Eesh, the puer toucha I get for my mother is a sixth that (40 bucks/lb) and that's still pretty steep to me just as a gift when I visit every few months.

It can get much more expensive than that. High Mountain Tea has to be grown above a certain altitude, so the constant cloud cover causes the leaves to develop slowly. And that 150 grams only lasts about a week. It's a shame she couldn't be addicted to something cheaper, like cocaine instead.

I mean, it's not literally an addiction. She doesn't have to spend four grand a year on tea.

It was intended to be slightly facetious, but why not? If she doesn't get that fragrance, she feels that 'life isn't worth living'. People who are addicted to caffeine might feel the same way, without necessarily knowing why. They don't have to spend $x on it, but they feel very miserable if they don't. So, to all intents and purposes.

I'd like to think I'd review my priorities if I were spending that much on coffee, but maybe that's a function of income level.

It's more than £1000 per year on tea, and yes - to my mind that's ridiculous, and a source of tension between us. My austere upbringing (and heavy adult-life debt) has made me quite neurotic about money, which is doubly annoying because my retired parents seem to have thrown that all out of the window.

In short, spending habits are rarely a function of income.

My parents have one of the apple shaped wooden ones. They never kept tea in it though, so I never realized what it was until now.