I feel the title of that article is misleading. From the article:
'"The markets where instant coffee is most popular tend to be the ones without a strong tradition of coffee drinking," Dana LaMendola, and industry analyst at Euromonitor, said in an interview. "It's basically an entry point."'
So it's not that people prefer one over the other, it's because they don't have much of a coffee culture and people don't really care about the quality of their coffee. Saying you prefer instant coffee to quality, roasted beans is like saying you prefer a prepackaged, microwavable dinner to a properly cooked meal.
Or, places with a "strong tradition of coffee drinking" are resistant to change independent of actual quality -- because coffee is ritualized -- and so tend not to prefer instant coffee even to cheap (in the quality rather than price sense) roasted beans.
That's ridiculous. Would you say the same about areas where people consume more microwaved dinners over cooked meals? That the people cooking their meals are just resistant to change?
> That the people cooking their meals are just resistant to change?
That's not what I said in the coffee case; I said that the preference differences between places with strong coffee traditions and those without may be partially due to the fact that having a strong tradition of coffee drinking includes a culture attached to the ritual of preparation.
I did not say that the people in an area that has a relatively strong preference for instant who individually do not are "just resistant to change".
That being said, you certainly might see something similar in regional distribution of preferences for prepackaged foods vs. freshly-prepared foods that aren't explained by other socioeconomic factors, though I'd expect that "food" is general enough that you it would be a very weak factor (though probably much stronger if you look at specific foods rather than "food" as a whole.)
When I still drank coffee, I preferred instant coffee because I could control the strength of it by merely adding more than was intended to the water. No messing around with expresso. Coffee was always a means to an end for me though, that end being caffeine.
I've since switched to caffeinated gum. Probably more expensive if I ran the numbers, but way more convenient and I burn my mouth less now.
It's not a preference over all of them. It's that most makers of coffee do it as an afterthought and a few particular brands of instant beat that quality level easily. Also they don't like Starbucks.
Sure, there are terrible beans out there that may be worse than instant coffee, just like there are terribly cooked meals out there worse than microwaved dinners. Parent stated "What I have come to this this: few coffees compare to Nescafe Gold a.k.a. Taster's Choice." which is an absurd statement. Most beans you get from even Starbucks (as long as they are fresh and suite your tastes [light, dark, etc]) will be way better than the instant stuff, let alone the stuff you can get from the thousands of other coffee roasters around the country.
"few coffees compare" I might rate as being about one standard deviation above the average fresh coffee, 85th percentile. It's not an expert opinion saying it's in the top five coffees in the entire world.
So the claim is that an exceptional premade food could manage to be unexceptional-but-good among freshly cooked foods.
'"The markets where instant coffee is most popular tend to be the ones without a strong tradition of coffee drinking," Dana LaMendola, and industry analyst at Euromonitor, said in an interview. "It's basically an entry point."'
So it's not that people prefer one over the other, it's because they don't have much of a coffee culture and people don't really care about the quality of their coffee. Saying you prefer instant coffee to quality, roasted beans is like saying you prefer a prepackaged, microwavable dinner to a properly cooked meal.