Think back as far as you can in the working environment, and it just seems like coffee has always been there, right? As long as you can remember, for as many years as you care to think back to all the offices in which you have worked, and coffee has always been a staple when it comes to work culture and maintaining focus and energy amongst employees.
But where did it all start, anyways? And where and when did coffee become such a force around the office? It’s a little more recent addition than you might think, but to uncover this fun little mystery, it might be worth it to go a bit back in time and figure out what’s up with coffee as a whole.
Thousands of Years, Little Changes
Coffee as a drink started thousands of years ago in several places around the world, including the Middle East, and Latin America. Not surprisingly, it was more of a cocoa drink that was consumed at celebrations, birthdays, and major events, as well as being consumed by more royal, official and wealthy people in various cultures along the way.
The drink has changed quite a bit in the past few thousand years, but it also hasn’t; after all, it just comes down to mashing up coffee beans and providing them a place to sit in water, right? While changes have occurred over the years and centuries, coffee has always been relatively constant, and while it has been passed from culture to culture, it has always been revered for its energy-providing capacities.
Mad Men and the 1950s
Sure, you’ve probably seen the television show Mad Men, which has actors portraying a major ad agency in the 1950s, and those characters are more apt to drink alcohol than coffee. Though that may or may not be a relatively true portrayal of the business climate of the 1950s, it’s nevertheless around that time that coffee as a “thing” really broke big in the office setting.
Businesses were growing rapidly after World War II, cities in America were modernizing, growing, and rapidly gaining wealth in just a few year’s time, and employers were looking for things not only to attract employees, but to keep them focused, energized, and hard at work. In addition, employees themselves were spending more time looking for something to get them ready for their focused, fast-paced and frenetic jobs of the time.
Coffee became a natural staple in American office buildings, as it proved to be durable, long-lasting, and quite cheap when it came down to it; with some water, sugar, cream, and a few imported coffee beans from Mexico or Central America, you had yourself one steaming hot cup of java. From there, coffee has only grown as millions upon millions of people consume it both within and outside of office settings each and every day across the country, and around the world.
