Students like junior Claire Hughes rely on arguably the world’s most popular beverage to get through the day.

Teenage students are beginning to drink Mom and Pop’s pastime favorite: coffee.

“If I don’t get coffee in the morning, it’s a problem,” Hughes said.

“I won’t be able to stay awake in Mrs. (Lisa) Van Gorp’s class.”

Although the time-honor tradition of grabbing a jolt of java is the same, for students, getting their “fix” is hardly economical.

“I spend way too much,” Hughes said. Her ballpark estimate of her weekly coffee bill is somewhere near $25 (that’s $1,200 a year).

Hughes’s mother, Diana Bacon, said that she had to take Hughes’s credit card when she reviewed last month’s bill and found over $230 in Starbucks charges.

That sounds like quite a margin of profit when coffee and other caffeinated drinks are made of water, ground coffee beans and flavorings.

Starbucks Coffee, located in the Price Cutter on East Battlefield Road, has a usual crowd of Glendale’s finest.

“I go there most mornings and see a lot of people I know,” junior Ben Ellis said.

Starbucks workers declined to comment on their “coffee” and their customers, but they said they suspect “a lot” of high school students buy there.

Judging by student responses, the most popular café in the area is the Mudhouse, located downtown on South Avenue. A “mudpuddle” — an iced Colombian coffee with a vanilla flavor — runs at $4.

It might not be fiscally smart to buy a cup of coffee that costs more than a gallon of gas, but at the same time, people seem to spend whatever it takes to feel the caffeine and sensory pleasure coffee offers.

Some say the difference between a 50 cent and $4 cocoa concoction has everything to do with quality, and consider coffee production an art that starts with the bean grower and ends with the guy who pours it in your insulated cup.

Others disagree. “There’s that artsy-type of people who get a kick out of it,” senior Alex Moffe said.

“It’s sick, it must give them a boost.