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Notes -
Always has been as far as I know. Some quick googling claims that at the moment if you buy an average container of ground coffee (that you brew yourself, we're not talking Starbucks here) you can get it for about 26 cents per 12 oz cup (and probably cheaper if you get the cheapest brand available and/or brew it weakly). Milk is about 4 dollars per gallon which makes ten 12 oz cups, which is 40 cents each. Order of magnitude is the same, so I can't imagine getting coffee because you "can't afford milk", you'd probably just get smaller amounts of milk, but in the past the difference was probably larger.
With a high-end home bean-to-cup coffee machine, my marginal cost of decent espresso is about 40p per shot:
We pay 95p per imperial (20oz) pint to have milk home-delivered, so a half-pint glass of milk costs us slightly more than an espresso shot, but the milk in a late still costs less than the coffee. You could halve the cost of milk by buying in bulk at the supermarket, but then drinking proper espresso coffee is a premium experience as well.
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