Ergh, Good way to depress us on a Monday survey guys. Apparently, the average office worker spends £10.59 a day on coffees, lunch and snacks to eat at work, which all adds up to the princely sum of £2,500 a year. Gross. That’s probably precisely the amount that we’re meant to be saving for all that jazz our parents bang on about like, erm, a house and/or our pension. The trouble is, though, that even a positively disgusting statistic like this probably won't prompt a change in our lazy-ass behaviour. We're just too set in our ways.
Here’s why we’re not giving up spending silly money on food.
It avoids the awkward office kitchen bants
Ergh, God is there anything worse than standing awkwardly in your miniscule kitchen (that totally still stinks after Sally had mackerel last month BTW facilities dudes) clutching your thermos of soup and waiting for a microwave while you and that guy that sits two desks down from you awkwardly ask about each others’ weekends? Surely by the time he’s talked you through the quality of Yorkshire puds at his family dinner on Sunday, £10.59 seems like a small price to pay to escape this slow-but-sure death you’re going to wake up sweating in the middle of the night about for months.
It means you get to leave the office
You might have just been on Reddit for the past two hours rather than doing any work, but staring at a screen all morning is hard. And although you have yet to see any evidence, that whole thing your mum once said about it turning your eyes square is probably almost definitely true so leaving the office and taking a break at some point is essential. If you’ve brought your lunch with you, though, you’re heading into the outside world with no direct purpose – meaning you’ll normally walk 30 seconds up the road before doing that awkward, ‘Oh I must have forgotten something!’ pivot and heading back to the safety of your desk.
It means you get an extra 15 minutes in bed
Right now, we’ve got our morning routine down to a 17-minute art that includes a shower, outfit choice and half a face of make-up. (The other half is for the train). It’s a routine that’s been honed down to the bare bones over a decade and a half of getting ourselves up in the morning while retaining maximum bed time and, if we’re perfectly honest, no amount of money saving could ever encourage us to add an extra 10 minutes in there buttering bread and chopping up salad. It’d be like trying to improve the Mona Lisa. You don’t mess with perfection.
It means you have less money to spend on silly things
Hey, £2,500 is quite a substantial amount of our measly wage and as much as we'd like to think that if we saved it we'd spend it on something sensible, like a mortgage, in reality it would almost definitely go on either a whole bunch of awful clothes that we drunk-bought online that'll sit at the back on our wardrobe until we donate them to Oxfam in about three years' time when we get round to clearing shit out, or it would go on terrible things like buying more alcoholic drinks on a Saturday night, which, let's face it, is probably not a good thing for anyone.
Because it makes us happy, alright?**
**
There's not many little things we get to decide for ourselves throughout the day. We're at work way past 6pm, which is definitely out of our control, our preference to have a clean kitchen is routinely compromised by our stupid flatmates and their addiction to creating monstrous foodie extravaganzas midweek while we absolutely hate it, we've got no choice but to spend our mornings smashed into the armpit of some hairy commuter on the train. So my friends, if come 1pm we fancy spending a stupidly extortionate amount on a salad that's basically a few lettuce leaves with some non-descript smelly dressing then more fool us, but my God, we're going to own that decision alright? Just lend us a few quid at the end of the month, yeah?
Follow Jess on Twitter @jess_commons
Picture: Stephanie Gonot
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.