What Would You Do With the $500 You Spend on K-Cups?
The most disturbing thing about your coffee: that you’re paying 3-5 times more than you need to. Single Serve Coffee, which utilize the now-famous K-Cups (K for Kardashian?), is the fastest growing sector of the coffee economy.
NPR reported this morning from an interview with Bill Chappel, an analyst at SunTrust Robertson Humphrey.
How much coffee do you drink? At least 2 cups, right? This is America! So where you would spend about $1.50, tops, on your weekly coffee. Throw in an extra 50 cents for the filters and you’re looking at $2 per week, tops. With K-Cups, we spend around $11.50 per week, just for coffee. I’ve left milk out of this calculation to keep things easy.
Over the course of a year, your from-the-bag coffee expenses are going to be somewhere in the vicinity of $100. For K-Cups, we’re looking at annual coffee expenses of $600. Six hundred dollars! K-Cups cost us $500 more every year and we buy them anyway.
In fact, the K-Cup market is worth over $4 billion annually, most of which is controlled by the Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. You remember that environmentally-friendly coffee company, right? Green is in their title! Mountains are on their logo!
The somewhat innacurately branded (perhaps even greenwashed) brand just announced a partnership with coffee king of the world, Starbucks, to distribute Starbucks coffee in K-Cups for in-home consumption. The deal is expected to net Starbucks a cool (or rather, piping hot) $1 billion. So much for the brand that wants so desperately to solve its paper cup problem.
I don’t want to think about how much wasted plastic that entails (too much, too too much. Easily 5 billion K-Cups annually, easily millions of tons of single use disposable cups that save, tops, 2 minutes in the morning).
Instead, I want to go return to the notion that Americans, many of whom are unemployed or underemployed, are spending $500 more every year than we need to spend on our caffeine fix. K-Cups are, perhaps, the very epitomy of the dumb things we've invented.
Friday, November 4, 2011 at 12:34PM
Reader Comments (1)
I am going to have to agree with you here, I never really saw the point of single use coffee makers, just put less water and coffee in a drip coffee maker and make yourself one cup! It is crazy how much the keurig's and Tassimo's cost, but people don't care because they like the variety and convenience. You can use re-useable k-cups though which I always recommend.