Press a button and it’s done. Single-serve coffee machines are delicious, easy, and a sure sign of your upward mobility. But The New York Times is blowing the foil lid off the terrible truth: those little plastic cups factor out to about $50 or more per pound. Apparently, single-serve coffee is one more devil spawn of Starbucks. The Times writes:
“Americans under the age of 40 are thinking about coffee pricing in cups,” said Ric Rhinehart, executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America. “If you asked my mother how much coffee cost, she would have told you that the red can was $5.25 a pound and the blue can was $4.25. If you ask people in their 20s and 30s, they’ll say coffee is $1.75 to $3.75 a cup.”
Of course, it follows that anyone charging $175 for a coffee maker will probably rip you off on the coffee itself, especially when they pack it in tiny, excessively wrapped, proprietary containers. Consider it the Gillette safety razor of coffee. Here’s the Times’ full story.