āWe were wrong.ā
You donāt hear that very often.
Being an autodrip- or French-press-kinda gal, Iād like to know why people like K-cup coffee. Iāve had it, and it just didnāt have the punch that auto-dripped or French-pressed coffee does.
There are several reasons Iāve resisted buying a Keurig machine, but this makes me want to get one just to reward this level of honesty and willingness to understand the customersā position.
I still love my old coffee machine, and itās unlikely Iām going to need to replace it for a very long time, but maybe in the meantime I can buy some Keurig stock.
Keurig Chief Financial Officer Fran Rathke said that shipments of pods by volume were below the companyās expectations due to a āsomewhat higher than expected consumer price elasticity at retail.ā
Apparently thatās how an MBA says āCustomers didnāt react well to higher pricesā.
Unfortunately, this appears to be a āwe were wrongā of the āto think that we could get away with itā flavor, rather than the āto have triedā flavor; so the plan is to ābring more brands into the ecosystemā rather than drop the stupid plan.
(The other reason that Iām generally unwilling to give them the benefit of the doubt is that the earnings call included the dreadful spew below from the president and CEO:
āSome of this was due to consumer confusion around pod compatibility
which weāve mentioned in the past. Although we are seeing improvement as
we transition more formally unlicensed brands into our manufacturing
system.ā
It is basically never good when āconsumer confusionā gets blamed. At best, customers are confused because your marketing and/or directions arenāt sufficiently clear or your product is excessively hard to use. At worst, itās a cloyingly patronizing āthe little people just donāt like our fucking with them because they donāt understand the benefits that fuckery will bring, not because itās overtly contrary to their interests or anythingā. In this case, Iām going with the latter, since āpod compatibilityā was deliberately made confusing and uncertain by adding the DRM system.)
Wouldnāt it be great if part of the reason their sales went down was because people felt guilty of all the unnecessary landfill created by these things?
Or that people realized that using heated soft plastic as a coffee filter canāt possibly be good for you?
Itās handy at work if you want exactly one cup of coffee and donāt want to screw around with methods that take more than 20 seconds. Thatās pretty much the entire reason the things exist.
Anyway, I expect part of Keurigās trouble is DRM, but a larger part is the increasingly (and desrvedly) bad publicity surrounding the expense and wastefulness of it all compared to every other coffee method.
" He also plans to launch a cold-brew coffee-brewing machine."
Iām imagining a big plastic jug, pre-filled with K-water containing the proprietary solvent that will dissolve the K-cold coffee pods.
Me, I use my existing machine. I just donāt plug it in.
Iāve had the same one for 35 years [mine not pictured], it takes licking and keeps on ticking!
But itās better than instant coffee? Which is admittedly not so great.
Consumers have a poor ability to read sincerity.
Not only do these pod machines make terrible coffee but they are horrible for the environment. I for one would not shed a tear if Kurig (and nesspresso, and whoever else) went out of business. Grind your own beans!
Iām still not sure this even counts as DRM. We need a new word for it.
Or maybe we donāt - I thought the Lexmark case invalidated this exact practise?
Do you have a recommendation? I loved my old Braun and it died. The new Brauns arenāt any good.
Yup, much better than instant. Not that thatās saying much.
Corporations are responsible to the share holders, not the consumers. I agree it is nice they didnt blame the consumer and their non decision making employees this time, but I dont think this was a shift in perception either. If the stock prices rebound, the customer complaints will go right back to the deleted folder.
Convenience. Thatās it, really. The coffeeās nowhere near as good as French press, drip, or pour-over, but having a rack of a half-dozen different kinds of coffee (dark, light, flavored, decaf) to just grab, brew, and have a single cup in thirty seconds outweighs the quality difference a lot of the time.
I donāt own one, but when we had one in our office, it was terrific. Everyone could have the kind of coffee they wanted, there was no cleanup, nobody on ācoffee pot dutyā.
Go to a thrift store. Many of them will let you actually plug appliances in to see if they work, and old coffeemakers are āhipā now.
I wish I did. The one Iāve got is about twenty five years old, and I canāt even remember the brand name. I think the key to its longevity is simplicity. Water goes in, gets heated, and filters through the ground coffee. Not fancy, but it does the trick.
Itās even simpler than my parentsā old percolator, although I miss the percolatorās noise: blblblblb-shhh-hmhmhmhm.
Cause I really like coffee but canāt drink more than 2 or so cups without caffeine issues I have a jar of instant decaf at work as the only other choice is kcups which on the whole are not that much better at 10 times the cost of the instant coffee. It definitely isnāt all that much better than the drip machine which is still way cheaper as well.
