‘Friends’: Exactly How Much Coffee Did Everyone’s Favorite Friend Group Drink?
Friends remains one of the most iconic shows of the 1990s and early 2000s. Over its ten-season run, the series drew in an incredible number of viewers. The show experienced renewed interest when Netflix and later HBO Max added the series to their streaming catalogs. There are three locations in Friends that are so iconic that they were even turned into Lego sets. One of those locales, a local coffee shop, is beloved by fans of the series. Do you know exactly how many cups of coffee were served at Central Perk, though? Someone did the math.
How many cups of coffee were served on ‘Friends’?
Monica Geller, Ross Geller, Chandler Bing, Joey Tribbiani, Phoebe Buffay, and Rachel Green spent considerable time hanging out in Monica and Rachel’s apartment. When they weren’t spending time in the rent-controlled abode, the gang assembled at Central Perk.
During the show’s long and successful career, the gang drank a lot of coffee. Just how many cups were served, though? According to fans who have tracked the coffee consumption, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Phoebe, Joey, and Rachel were heavily caffeinated. They consumed 1,154 cups of coffee in 10 seasons.
When you think about it, it wasn’t really that much coffee
Sure, when you hear that over 1,000 cups of coffee were poured during the show’s 10-season run, it sounds like a lot. When you break it down, it wasn’t all that much coffee when you consider how many episodes aired and how many characters were drinking those cups of coffee.
NBC aired 236 episodes of Friends before the show ended. There were six main cast members, and all of them drank coffee, albeit some drank it more often than others. When you do the math, nearly 5 cups of coffee were served in each Friends’ episode. That means one of the six pals went without coffee during each episode.
Twitter user, Kitlochery, took things a step further and kept track of just how many cups of coffee each character drank. According to the user’s calculations, Rachel Green drank the fewest cups of coffee, ingesting 138 cups during the show’s 10-season run. Rachel drank substantially fewer cups than her friends. She drank nearly 100 fewer cups of coffee than the most caffeinated of the Friends crew. That makes sense, though. She spent the first few seasons working at Central Perk, not hanging out. Once she moved on to a new job, she drank far more java.
One might expect Phoebe Buffay to abstain from coffee beverages, but the free-spirited member of the group was the most caffeinated, according to Kitlochery. Phoebe had 227 cups of coffee during the show’s illustrious run.
Was ‘Friends’ just a well-planned strategy to get TV viewers to check out Starbucks?
Over the years, Friends fans have come up with many theories about their favorite series. One fan theory even questioned if the show was just a well-planned marketing strategy. In 2017 a viewer named Alex Baker pondered whether Friends was a show meant to set the stage for the rise of Starbucks.
According to Glamour, Baker claimed that Rachel’s hair was similar to the famed Starbucks logo and that Central Perk served as a stand-in for the popular chain coffee house. While it’s true that Starbucks wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is today, the Seatle-based coffee company was already growing. In 1994, the year Friends premiered, Starbucks already had 425 locations. During Friends’ 10-season run, the popularity of the coffee retailer did explode. By the time the series aired its final episode in 2004, there were more than 10,000 retail locations. Whether that was because of Friends has never been established. After all, correlation does not equal causation.
