To be fair, the cast of Friends did seem to drink a lot of coffee…
Central Perk were probably able to make a healthy profit based just on the six of them and any of the unfortunates who wandered into their caffeinated orbit.
The funny thing is, even after all of these years, people are still really hungry (or thirsty?) to learn more about Rachel and Ross, Joey and Chandler, Phoebe and Monica, even though you’d reckon we knew everything there was to know about them already.
We would have guessed that since she worked in a coffee shop, Rachel would’ve been the biggest coffee buyer, but it turns out she was dead last.
Digging through old stuff, just found my results from the time I went through all 236 episodes of Friends to see how much coffee they drank. pic.twitter.com/4Kg7QO0mA6
— Kit Lovelace (@kitlovelace) June 27, 2017
That does go some way to explain Phoebe’s jittery nature… even though she claimed to be all zen and peaceful and light, she always did strike us as the one most likely to snap and kill the rest of them.
The author of the study did also go some way to explaining their findings:
I scrubbed through the non-Central Perk scenes, keeping a keen eye on any mug/potential cup activity. Central Perk scenes all got watched.
— Kit Lovelace (@kitlovelace) June 27, 2017
It got progressively easier as the series progressed, relocating out of the cafe and taking place in all manner of madcap locations instead.
— Kit Lovelace (@kitlovelace) June 27, 2017
I do remember at the time deciding to make the assumption that anything in a mug was coffee unless otherwise stipulated…
— Kit Lovelace (@kitlovelace) June 27, 2017
For example, there was this scene where they’re pouring orange juice into their mugs – but they rarely drank coffee outside of Central Perk. pic.twitter.com/YahBhFGn3F
— Kit Lovelace (@kitlovelace) June 27, 2017
They also worked out over the course of the show how much they spent on a cup of coffee in Central Perk ($1.50), how much they’d tip (20%), and even worked out the average of coffee consumption of the ten seasons, and you can see a sharp drop from everyone as the show went on.
Moreover, I then went ahead and broke it down season by season to see how their habits developed and changed over time… pic.twitter.com/IoJ1lDNnpv
— Kit Lovelace (@kitlovelace) June 27, 2017
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