The Keurig Effect

Now before I start, people have used this name before and after for all sorts of unrelated issues, so more correctly one could say it's ONE of the Keurig effects. Namely the marketing one.

So in 2017, Keurig (a manufacturer of coffee machines among other things) decided to pull their advertisments from Sean Hannity's Fox News show, not just for his general personality, but over his coverage of the rape of a 14 year old. Coming at a time when many people were already boycotting Keurig over their non-biodegradable coffee cups, or the "pods" for their coffee machines which had the same issue, basically someone in their PR department decided that their corporate image can't take any more controversy and distanced themselves from one source of controversy.

Note that Keurig didn't really become some leftist company over night or anything. They still weren't doing anything about their biodegradable coffee cups or pods or anything. And AFAIK even about Hannity they didn't actually go on record to say that he's wrong or anything. They just cancelled their advertisments.

And what happened next was a publicity boost that nobody expected. A bunch of idiots were flooding Twitter and YouTube to post photos and videos of them smashing up their Keurig coffee machine.

And Keurig's sales, which had been continuously falling since 2014, suddenly spiked.

Millions of people who hadn't even heard the name Keurig before, now couldn't go anywhere online without being constantly reminded that (A) they make coffee machines, and that (B) they must be pretty good machines, if all these ultra-conservative types had had one, and their ONLY complaint about it was the lack of advertisment money for Hannity. It was more exposure and in fact downright advertisment in just the first week than Keurig's marketing budget would have gotten them in a whole year.

Better yet, one might suspect that SOME of the lemmings queueing up to show that they too are smashing a Keurig coffee machine, just like the rest of the brainless bleating herd, may have just bought a new one just to smash it.

And other companies' marketing departments were starting to take notice too.

If you ever wonder what was with the Gillette and Nike ads that provoked a similar reaction, and similar spikes in sales, yeah, that's what. Again, neither company had actually become any more environmentally friendly, or less using sweatshops in poor countries, or anything. Or Gillette may have been ok with being less stereotypical about genders in one ad, but they sure as f-word weren't cancelling their 'pink tax' for their products aimed at women.

But that didn't matter. What mattered was that thousands of idiots who probably didn't even see the actual ad when it aired, were looking for the next thing to be offended about, were informed by others that there's something they may want to be offended about, had a look, and were dutifully offended. And proceeded to manifest that offense by providing the company they were offended by with unprecedented levels of exposure.


So anyway, why am I saying all this? Well, because it seems to me like idiots on both sides of each issue are currently embattled over exactly that, except it's about other products. For example, movies.

If you ever thought that a multi-billion dollar international corporation is willing to make a loss and ruin their brand just to promote some woke idea (*cough*"the force is female"*cough*), and that made them either your heroes or your villains to fight for or against on the interwebs, congrats, you too might be the kind of useful idiot they hoped you'd be. In reality they were most likely hoping you'd dutifully take to the interwebs to provide them with more exposure. Like thousands dutifully did.

And if you just idly wondered "what were they thinking?" well, now you have a reasonable guess at that.

Of course, the major difference is that Keurig, Gillette or Nike weren't actually changing their actual product to create a controversy. People flocking to YouTube or Twitter to bash Keurig (quite literally, bash; they were smashing their coffee machines) weren't actually saying that Keurig coffee machines sucked. Quite the contrary, obviously all of them had seen no reason to replace theirs before being offended by the company. Anyone who didn't care whether they not they supported Hannity could only take away the conclusion that their coffee machines at the very least worked well enough.

In the case of several recent movies, well, that was a different story.

Will it work as well for them as it did for Keurig? We shall live and see.

May have happened that way in the past, once; may even happen one more time -- as you say, we'll see -- but this seems too, I don't know, random, for a company to actually base strategy on, doesn't it? For all you know this might have the exact opposite effect, mightn't it? So unless you're already in dire straits for other extraneous reasons, or perhaps you're so fledgling so tiny that you're willing to stake all on a throw of the dice (win big, vs lose small, because all you are is small), I don't see that this kind of desperate gamble makes sense as conscious deliberate strategy, not for a 'serious' company or brand.

But of course, if they're doing it, they're doing it, and who am I to argue with facts? I guess what I'm driving at is, do we know that this Keurig effect thing is, now, for that matter ever, deliberately (attempted to be) orchestrated, or are we only guessing?

HansMustermann said:

And if you just idly wondered "what were they thinking?" well, now you have a reasonable guess at that.

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No, what they had done is conflated twitter noise for customer feedback.

I was one of the people who stopped buying Gillette products. It wasn't the advertising per se, but their reaction to people calling them out on their mistake. I just want shaving products, I don't need to make a political statement with it. So I went with Harry's and haven't looked back. But, of course, now we are living in a world where I don't have to go into the office, I'm not shaving but once a month.

I don't consider the political message I make when I buy consumer products. I doubt I'm alone in this thinking. I think it's like what is happening in the comic book industry. The people who are complaining would never buy the books in the first place, even if the changes they are demanding go into place. Happened in the computer gaming space too.

I guess the opposite effect would be the MyPillow effect.

MyPillow is a marginal product that has become popular because it's one of the few advertisers buying ad space on Tucker Carlon's White Nationalist Power Hour every night, despite all other advertisers fleeing like it's radioactive.

@Chanakya
Well, it certainly wasn't intentional when it happened to Keurig. As I was saying, they were already having other controversies on their plate, and actually wanted to distance themselves from one, not create a new one. It was as much to their surprise as to anyone else's when one more controversy actually created a spike in sales.

Whether other companies are doing it intentionally, well, I doubt any company will come out and say "we just wanted to troll idiots for exposure." Your PR guys AND your legal department would have an aneurism at the very thought of it.

But I think you can take an educated guess, basically. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it might just be one. If you don't see any changes of more substance to indicate some company actually being any more "woke" or whatever, and it's just some statements that were 100% predictable to cause a crap-storm on the Internet, and did cause one, well... it may have been intentional.

Not the least because, as I was saying in the previous paragraphs, these kinds of things are pretty mandatory to run past the PR and legal departments. If a 6 year old could have predicted it would cause a crap-storm, so could these guys. It's their job. If it got through anyway, someone probably did predict the crap-storm and thought it wasn't a bad thing.

Leftus said:

No, what they had done is conflated twitter noise for customer feedback.

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I never said they wanted customer feedback. They wanted exposure, which is a completely different thing.

It's flowing in the completely opposite direction, for a start. Customer feedback is information flow from you to them. Publicity is information flow to you, and if not from them, at the very least about them.

SuburbanTurkey said:

I guess the opposite effect would be the MyPillow effect.

MyPillow is a marginal product that has become popular because it's one of the few advertisers buying ad space on Tucker Carlon's White Nationalist Power Hour every night, despite all other advertisers fleeing like it's radioactive.

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I haven't studied that particular product, but from what you write it doesn't necessarily have to be the opposite. It can be just the same effect. At the bottom of it, the Keurig effect is just trolling some group so they do your publicity for you. I don't think trolling the left-wingers to make people remember your product name is any different from trolling the right-wingers.

I'll never understand advertising and marketing. To the best of my knowledge, I've only responded negatively to an ad and become less inclined to buy the product. With the possible exception of product placement, which I did respond to when younger.

Keurig, for instance. I tried one at a friend's house, and thought it made abysmal coffee flavored water. The ads or news stories or whatever have no influence on my thinking about the product. For all the talk of 'advertising does this, exposure does that', I don't see why. It carries the assumption that people are remarkably helpless to the power of suggestion, and infinitely malleable. A bunch of economic Manchurian Candidates. I would hope normal people weren't.

*looks at sales data*

*sighs*

Well, that's kinda the point. Everyone will tell you that they aren't influenced at all by marketing or PR campaigns -- and in all fairness, some people probably aren't; I'm not calling out anyone in particular -- but when you look at sales data, it must have SOME effect on SOMEONE, right?

HansMustermann said:

I never said they wanted customer feedback. They wanted exposure, which is a completely different thing.

It's flowing in the completely opposite direction, for a start. Customer feedback is information flow from you to them. Publicity is information flow to you, and if not from them, at the very least about them.

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Just because you never said they wanted it, doesn't mean the companies in question didn't take what they though were customers, with their feedback, and ran with it.

They saw the message in what they thought was the cultural zeitgeist, which was nothing more than twitter noise, and ran with it. Without doing any real research with their actual customer base. Oh, look, "toxic masculinity" is on the rise on twitter, we should get ahead of that, without knowing if the people talking about it were customers or potential customers. Turns out they were neither, and 8 billion dollars later and they still haven't learned.

If we have learned anything, exposure doesn't pay the bills.

HansMustermann said:

@Chanakya
Well, it certainly wasn't intentional when it happened to Keurig. As I was saying, they were already having other controversies on their plate, and actually wanted to distance themselves from one, not create a new one. It was as much to their surprise as to anyone else's when one more controversy actually created a spike in sales.

Whether other companies are doing it intentionally, well, I doubt any company will come out and say "we just wanted to troll idiots for exposure." Your PR guys AND your legal department would have an aneurism at the very thought of it.

But I think you can take an educated guess, basically. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it might just be one. If you don't see any changes of more substance to indicate some company actually being any more "woke" or whatever, and it's just some statements that were 100% predictable to cause a crap-storm on the Internet, and did cause one, well... it may have been intentional.

Not the least because, as I was saying in the previous paragraphs, these kinds of things are pretty mandatory to run past the PR and legal departments. If a 6 year old could have predicted it would cause a crap-storm, so could these guys. It's their job. If it got through anyway, someone probably did predict the crap-storm and thought it wasn't a bad thing.

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Seems a little too conspiracy-theoretical to me.

HansMustermann said:

Well, that's kinda the point. Everyone will tell you that they aren't influenced at all by marketing or PR campaigns -- and in all fairness, some people probably aren't; I'm not calling out anyone in particular -- but when you look at sales data, it must have SOME effect on SOMEONE, right?

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That's the part that gives me pause. Are people really that easy to manipulate? Or is it simply getting their name out there as a possible contender for people to check out, then they make decisions normally, and the product stands on its own chops? Or do people actually change their perception of the product?

Prob a derail away from the theme, but it is a long term fascination for me. I'll shut up.

Leftus said:

Just because you never said they wanted it, doesn't mean the companies in question didn't take what they though were customers, with their feedback, and ran with it.

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Actually, I'm saying explicitly that they didn't. Every PR and marketing department who watched the thousands of idiots smashing their coffee machines didn't think, "hmm, those are valuable customers and we should take that to heart as valuable input." They just thought, "hmm, free publicity."

Thermal said:

That's the part that gives me pause. Are people really that easy to manipulate? Or is it simply getting their name out there as a possible contender for people to check out, then they make decisions normally, and the product stands on its own chops?

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At least as the theory goes, it's a little from column A, and a little from column B.

It's probably relevant context that Keurig didn't do this apropos of nothing.

Starting around at the latest 2016, there were organized attempts to name and shame advertisers that support right wing extremist propaganda, starting with Breitbart. This moved to others like Tucker Carlson and other Fox News personalities.

A popular strategy would be to screencap or clip a short video of these people spouting their white nationalist propaganda, then juxtapose it with the brand's ad, asking publicly if this is what the company supports.

Obviously some appliance company isn't going to want to explain why they think Tucker's views of dirty immigrants ruining our white nation is a good thing to support. That's how you get to a situation where MyPillow accounts for 1/3 of all advertising revenue for a primetime cable show. Nobody wants to touch it, unless they are explicitly trying to cultivate a reactionary brand image to rip off Fox News grandpas.

Was Keurig doing something calculated and proactive in this move, or were they, like many other advertisers, reacting to a campaign of negative PR meant to damage these propagandist outlets?

HansMustermann said:

At least as the theory goes, it's a little from column A, and a little from column B.

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I think it's actually "a little from column A, and a lot from column B."

Where column B is, "Or is it simply getting their name out there as a possible contender for people to check out, then they make decisions normally, and the product stands on its own chops?"

My impression is that we have pretty good data on diminishing returns in political advertising. Candidates have to spend a certain amount to get their name out there and secure a competitive base of votes. But after that, more spending doesn't secure more votes in a linear fashion. Often enough, the biggest spender isn't the winner of the election.*

And the world of commerce is rife with products that got tons of marketing dollars, but still failed miserably on their own chops. New Coke and the Edsel are nigh-canonical examples.

To a certain degree, I think it's the same basic mechanism that makes spam profitable: Get your product in front of enough people, and theres a statistical near-certainty that some of them will buy it no matter how bad it is.

---
*Though, political corruption being endemic, I sometimes wonder how much of that big spending is actual campaign efforts, and how much of it is slush fund transfers to cronies.

Pretty much, yes.

It was always thus. To quote Phineas T. Barnum^*:

"There's no such thing as bad publicity"


_____________________________
^* OK, like so many things, maybe he did not say it:
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/there-is-no-such-thing-as-bad-
publicity.html

But, as they say, "There is Nothing New Under the Sun" (Ecclesiastes 1:9)

Well, actually there IS. Just think of having your restaurant in the news for starting a salmonella outbreak again. However, in certain cases the good effects can more than outbalance the bad.

theprestige said:

Seems a little too conspiracy-theoretical to me.

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Conspiracy-theoretical? You don't know the half of it. Those 'thousands of idiots' buying Keurigs just to smash them up - how we know they weren't paid by Keurig to do it? Huh? Huh?

I haven't followed the Keurig story, but I do wonder if the decision to drop Hannity was as unalloyed as the OP suggests. Keurig is, and has long been, associated with Green Mountain Coffee (the first manufacturer to provide Keurig pods, who later purchased the company), and I suspect that Suburban Turkey is right in suggesting that the negative publicity preceding the drop was quite uncomfortable for the parent company, which styles itself as fairly hip and organic and whatnot, despite its rather non-green coffee maker.

I'm a little surprised that a company like Green Mountain (or what was by then Keurig Green Mountain) was tone deaf enough to advertise on Hannity in the first place. I bet Speeder and Earl know better!

Gord_in_Toronto said:

It was always thus. To quote Phineas T. Barnum^*:

"There's no such thing as bad publicity"


_____________________________
^* OK, like so many things, maybe he did not say it:
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/there-is-no-such-thing-as-bad-
publicity.html

But, as they say, "There is Nothing New Under the Sun" (Ecclesiastes 1:9)

Click to expand...

I think the rise of cancel culture shows that there is indeed such a thing as bad publicity. But actually there are plenty of examples going back much further. There's the Streisand effect. There's the myriad of publicity setbacks that plagued the Hillary campaign (remember Comey's October Surprise?).

Let's see. Sarah Palin garnered a lot of publicity, and probably cost McCain the presidency. South Africa got a ton of bad publicity for apartheid. We have laws about libel, slander, and defamation; and we have courts that consistently uphold the idea that these are harmful, not helpful, publicity.

What might have been true in Barnum's case (even if he never said it) is that in his line of work, he had a knack for turning bad publicity to a business advantage. Or at least a knack for weathering it without having to shut down. Ronald Reagan had a similar knack, somehow surviving Iran-Contra with his image intact. But Carter was pilloried for Operation Eagle Claw - no good publicity for him there! And I think everybody agrees that whatever else it was, Benghazi wasn't good publicity for Hillary Clinton.

It seems that Donald Trump has a similar knack to find advantage in bad publicity, or else just shrug it off. And I guess people are saying Elon Musk has the same knack? I could go along with that. But the whole cave-diving Twitter thing wasn't good publicity for him at all, no matter what the maxim says.

bruto said:

I haven't followed the Keurig story, but I do wonder if the decision to drop Hannity was as unalloyed as the OP suggests. Keurig is, and has long been, associated with Green Mountain Coffee (the first manufacturer to provide Keurig pods, who later purchased the company), and I suspect that Suburban Turkey is right in suggesting that the negative publicity preceding the drop was quite uncomfortable for the parent company, which styles itself as fairly hip and organic and whatnot, despite its rather non-green coffee maker.

I'm a little surprised that a company like Green Mountain (or what was by then Keurig Green Mountain) was tone deaf enough to advertise on Hannity in the first place. I bet Speeder and Earl know better!

Click to expand...

Well, Keurig and their exact motives and circumstances are rather irrelevant there, since, as I was saying, they're not the ones who planned to use the effect. They're just the ones to whom it happened (noticeably enough) first. They weren't planning to create a crap-storm, they were trying to avoid one. Doesn't even really matter WHY they were trying to avoid one. Honestly, at that point, that was what everyone and their PR department DID about their corporate image: try to keep it as clean and as far from crap-storms as humanly possible. Keurig didn't actually do anything special for that time.

That a crap-storm did happen and that it actually boosted sales is what turned out to be interesting. It was not planned or expected by Keurig themselves, but other companies did take notice that this was an option too.

Thermal said:

I'll never understand advertising and marketing. To the best of my knowledge, I've only responded negatively to an ad and become less inclined to buy the product. With the possible exception of product placement, which I did respond to when younger.

Keurig, for instance. I tried one at a friend's house, and thought it made abysmal coffee flavored water. The ads or news stories or whatever have no influence on my thinking about the product. For all the talk of 'advertising does this, exposure does that', I don't see why. It carries the assumption that people are remarkably helpless to the power of suggestion, and infinitely malleable. A bunch of economic Manchurian Candidates. I would hope normal people weren't.

*looks at sales data*

*sighs*

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I don't know if it actually works, sometimes there's correlation and sometimes there isn't -- and when there is, whether correlation is indeed causation can be, and is, argued every which way.

But they do try their ******* best to, as you say in your next post, manipulate people. Using things like NLP and subliminal messaging to influence consumer behavior, that's a done thing. If at all it works, I'd say it's diabolical; and even if it it doesn't, it's still creepy.

Chanakya said:

I don't know if it actually works, sometimes there's correlation and sometimes there isn't -- and when there is, whether correlation is indeed causation can be, and is, argued every which way.

But they do try their ******* best to, as you say in your next post, manipulate people. Using things like NLP and subliminal messaging to influence consumer behavior, that's a done thing. If at all it works, I'd say it's diabolical; and even if it it doesn't, it's still creepy.

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Yeah, seeing Bruce Lee wearing Asics shoes just once made a loyal buyer of me as a teen. The Blues Brothers wearing Ray Bans worked too. But now, pretty confident ads have either no effect or negative. If someone is prying money out of my wallet, my feelings about them don't weigh in. Its best value v features.

I wonder how much being reluctant to spend at all effects advertising influence? I see an ad and think 'they are trying to deceive me. I don't like/trust this company'. Brands I don't see ads for, I feel better about.

Maybe, but then you don't work in the same way like most people. Most people dread the most something they have no idea about. That's why publicity works.

Note that I'm not talking about either marketing or PR there, which are entirely different dishes. Just publicity. As in, you've heard of that company before.

Most people seem to basically go to the shop or on Amazon and be confronted by a bewildering array of names. Just for coffee machines, you see stuff like Bosch, Philips, De'Longhi, Melitta, Miele, Keurig, Krups, etc. WTH do all of them even do? Why is the Miele more expensive?

Of course, you could study reviews for each model, and if you actually believe that the market functions like in the ideal free market model, make a perfectly informed decision and pick exactly the best one for the money. Most actual people don't.

Just going "oh, I've heard of Keurig before" is already a step in the right direction. Well, for Keurig, anyway.

Using your coffee maker example, the last one I bought needed to be teal colored to match my wife's inexplicable decision to have all countertop appliances teal colored. I had a choice of three. Never heard of any of the brands. Similar reviews. Chose the cheapest. Now I'm happy. Pretty much how all my purchases go. 1) what has what I want? 2) is it a fair price? 3) Is there another option which is similar in 1 or 2 but much better on the other?

Eta: couple exceptions: American/locally made is a big plus. Nothing by Nike under any circumstances. Waterproof anything is good

Thermal said:

Using your coffee maker example, the last one I bought needed to be teal colored to match my wife's inexplicable decision to have all countertop appliances teal colored.

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Heh. Supposedly Big Business sits down every year to decide what next year's Color is going to be. As far as I can tell, it's mostly an exercise in figuring out what direction the popular trend is trending, and then going all-in on pushing that trend. A couple years back it briefly made the news that some shade of orange had been picked. So maybe your wife got hooked by the Teal Year.

HansMustermann said:

Millions of people who hadn't even heard the name Keurig before, now couldn't go anywhere online without being constantly reminded that (A) they make coffee machines, and that (B) they must be pretty good machines, if all these ultra-conservative types had had one, and their ONLY complaint about it was the lack of advertisment money for Hannity. It was more exposure and in fact downright advertisment in just the first week than Keurig's marketing budget would have gotten them in a whole year.

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I'm kind of amused at the notion that there were a whole lot of liberals out there who'd never heard of a Keurig machine, but whatever.

If you ever wonder what was with the Gillette and Nike ads that provoked a similar reaction, and similar spikes in sales, yeah, that's what.

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You are aware that about six months after Gillette's infamous ad, Proctor and Gamble (the parent company) had to write down the value of the brand by $8 billion?

theprestige said:

Heh. Supposedly Big Business sits down every year to decide what next year's Color is going to be. As far as I can tell, it's mostly an exercise in figuring out what direction the popular trend is trending, and then going all-in on pushing that trend. A couple years back it briefly made the news that some shade of orange had been picked. So maybe your wife got hooked by the Teal Year.

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Nah. She makes up things in her head that often don't exist, looks me in the eye and says "find"

theprestige said:

I think the rise of cancel culture shows that there is indeed such a thing as bad publicity. But actually there are plenty of examples going back much further. There's the Streisand effect. There's the myriad of publicity setbacks that plagued the Hillary campaign (remember Comey's October Surprise?).

Let's see. Sarah Palin garnered a lot of publicity, and probably cost McCain the presidency. South Africa got a ton of bad publicity for apartheid. We have laws about libel, slander, and defamation; and we have courts that consistently uphold the idea that these are harmful, not helpful, publicity.

What might have been true in Barnum's case (even if he never said it) is that in his line of work, he had a knack for turning bad publicity to a business advantage. Or at least a knack for weathering it without having to shut down. Ronald Reagan had a similar knack, somehow surviving Iran-Contra with his image intact. But Carter was pilloried for Operation Eagle Claw - no good publicity for him there! And I think everybody agrees that whatever else it was, Benghazi wasn't good publicity for Hillary Clinton.

It seems that Donald Trump has a similar knack to find advantage in bad publicity, or else just shrug it off. And I guess people are saying Elon Musk has the same knack? I could go along with that. But the whole cave-diving Twitter thing wasn't good publicity for him at all, no matter what the maxim says.

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I think the value of the publicity depends on how well you were known beforehand. If you have prior public exposure, an "incident" will harm you with some people and that might overweigh the good it might do in other people's eyes. If you are an unknown, any publicity is more than you had before. We had an example here in TO of "Balcony Girl" who became (in)famous for a selfie of her throwing a chair from a high balcony into the street. She seems to be burning through her 15 minutes of fame fairly fast however.

I knew exactly who you meant by "balcony girl". So I guess that was some really effective publicity.

I'm not entirely convinced the Keurig was taken entirely unaware here, but it's likely the crap storm they got was a better trade than they'd bargained on. I think they were not so much avoiding a storm as choosing which one, having already gotten some flak for a system that generates a good bit of waste, much of it plastic. But either way, it seems the size of the net positive effect was a surprise.

I think a lot of people were probably aware of Keurig, but not aware of its being so closely associated with Green Mountain Coffee, which cultivates an eco-friendly, fair trade, sustainability, etc. image.

Anyway, these days it's obviously a good idea to look at association not only on the positive side (my hero eats Wheaties, etc.) but on the negative, especially if your villain hates your product, not for what it actually is, but for political reasons.

bruto said:

I think they were not so much avoiding a storm as choosing which one, having already gotten some flak for a system that generates a good bit of waste, much of it plastic.

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Well, that's still not a fundamentally different idea, even if it may differ in the exact details and circumstances. It's still the traditional approach to PR, where you try to minimize the amount of crap-storm around your company name, even if you can't completely eliminate it, rather than deliberately provoke one for publicity.

And interesting (at least for me) aside wrt Keurig is that before it hit the market I participated in a consumer survey on what I thought about the idea of making coffee in a machine that used single serving/use containers. I said it was the most ridiculous, useless idea I had ever heard of and no one could possibly be so lazy as being unable to brew a cup from scratch. I just chalk this up to my once again misunderstanding the mass mind.

(And just don't ask me about the idea of selling water in plastic bottles.)

Gord_in_Toronto said:

And interesting (at least for me) aside wrt Keurig is that before it hit the market I participated in a consumer survey on what I thought about the idea of making coffee in a machine that used single serving/use containers. I said it was the most ridiculous, useless idea I had ever heard of and no one could possibly be so lazy as being unable to brew a cup from scratch. I just chalk this up to my once again misunderstanding the mass mind.
(

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My first reaction was "that's not going to be enough coffee"

I do have a knockoff, but I use it to make (iced) tea and hot chocolate.

I did use one once and I share the assessment that it was weak ass, and slightly cool, coffee. Also, it was either as slow, or slower than my coffee maker.

I never much got the idea of a Keurig at home, as cleaning a coffee pot is really pretty trivial, and it's so easy to fit ordinary equipment to make the amount you need at the strengh you like. Where the Keurig really makes sense is in waiting rooms and the like, where coffee is offered, but one cannot predict how much or when. It's a boon in places like garages and hospitals where you're waiting for service, and much better than having a pot that's usually either over-boiled or empty.

bruto said:

I never much got the idea of a Keurig at home, as cleaning a coffee pot is really pretty trivial, and it's so easy to fit ordinary equipment to make the amount you need at the strengh you like. Where the Keurig really makes sense is in waiting rooms and the like, where coffee is offered, but one cannot predict how much or when. It's a boon in places like garages and hospitals where you're waiting for service, and much better than having a pot that's usually either over-boiled or empty.

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This. In the home it makes no sense. In the workplace it's different.

No more slapfights about not brewing a new pot. No more slapfights about whose turn it is to clean the pot. No more wastage of 4-5 cups of coffee per day.

You walk into the break room, brew one cup of your preference, and walk out. Sure, you have to stand around while your cup brews. Maybe that's offset by the fact that you're never expected to brew a whole pot for the entire office.

I worked in an office that had one for a while, and it was pretty convenient - before the environmental backlash made single-serving brewers a mortal sin.

But not convenient enough for me. The whole process was still too fiddly, and I couldn't quite get in the habit of cleaning my mug. So I'd just hit Starbucks on the way in, or hit the Starbucks-run kiosk in the lobby, for my one (disposable) cup per day.

Eventually, Ms TP turned into a multi-cup-per-day coffee fiend. She invested in a proper home brewing device that turns out a whole pot in a reasonable amount of time. I invested in an insulated tumbler with a sealed lid. Now I wake up every morning, pour a fresh cup of coffee into my tumbler, seal the lid and shake to stir, and leave the rest of the pot for Ms TP. Before the Covid Times, the tumbler would ride to work with me in the morning, and ride home again in the evening, where it would be rinsed out and set aside ready for the next day.

We have one at home and it is perfect for us. We each have a cup first thing in the morning. Most days my wife has her second cup at work and I will get my second cup later in the morning either at home or work, depending. In the winter I like a cup of decaf in the afternoon.

Some days we need two cups. Some days we need three. Some days we need four. Some days they will all be consumed within about an hour and a half. Some days it will be several hours between the first and the last. That odd cup of decaf in the afternoon is never predictable.

Making a 4 cup pot every morning would mean wasting half the pot half the time and having burnt or cold coffee sometimes. Making a two cup pot every morning would mean making a second one or two cup pot some mornings. And really, making small pots of coffee never is as good as big pots.

I think the key to being happy with a keurig is being frustrated by all the coffee one regularly pours down the drain. It wasn't a big deal when I could drink the remains all day and not worry about it messing up my sleep patterns, but throwing out pot after pot every day gets to be a bit much.

The second part was realizing that neither of us have very good taste in coffee. I can tell the difference between a decent cup of coffee and a great cup of coffee, but a decent cup is fine for my morning cup. Every once in a blue moon I would pick up some fancy beans and grind a small batch and run them through the aeropress, but fuss outweighed the joy.

Once we found a cup that we both liked, it was a pretty easy switch.

Gord_in_Toronto said:

It was always thus. To quote Phineas T. Barnum^*:

"There's no such thing as bad publicity"


_____________________________
^* OK, like so many things, maybe he did not say it:
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/there-is-no-such-thing-as-bad-
publicity.html

But, as they say, "There is Nothing New Under the Sun" (Ecclesiastes 1:9)

Click to expand...

Also, the Streisand Effect, or the Spycatcher Effect, and a quote from Oscar Wilde...'There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.'