Actually people are making a wise financial decision when they do this -- email service is something that you cannot stop or easily change overnight; coffee is

Actually people are making a wise financial decision when they do this -- email service is something that you cannot stop or easily change overnight; coffee is something you can. If and when they are in a serious financial crunch (and even the moderately rich worry about this happening), they can stop spending the $5 on the latte, but if they used a paid email service they cannot stop spending the money on the email service because it is usually very critical to a lot of their future. With free and relatively good email services like YMail, GMail and Outlook, it doesn't make sound financial sense to spend money on a paid service that is critical to your daily life that you cannot cut it off when you are in a financially bad situation. Also the same people would go for free coffee if someone did offer free coffee daily at the same quality level as their favorite latte shop.