Fifteen Years of Joe

Over the years I have brought you a number of stories about comically overpriced consumer items in this space. My regular readers (assuming I have readers) will remember the tale of the $100,000 safety razor, the $60,000 mattress, the $40 bottle of water, and the $200,000 bottle of Scotch – all absurd examples of conspicuous consumption, prestige products taken to the extreme, or ridiculous assumptions of value added where no value could possibly be added that would account for the price differential. And yet, somehow, none of it quite measures up to a gizmo priced at $11,111 that will produce a product that you can obtain on virtually any street corner in America for around $2…

If you missed the original story – or were too revolted to click on the link until now – you can pick up the original story off the Marketwatch site here; if not I’ll just spoil it for you and tell you that it’s the curious tale of an $11,111 coffee maker. The price was deliberately chosen (along with the name and several other characteristics) to repeatedly suggest the number 1 – as in, this is the best coffee maker on the market. And apparently it can, in fact, produce a really exceptional pot of coffee, nuanced to conform to the operator’s ideal brew on every possible dimension used by people who worry about such things. None of which really changes the fact that, as far as I can tell, you’re paying in excess of $11,000 for an appliance that can be obtained for $29.99 (or roughly 370 times the basic cost)…

Or, if you like, you’re paying roughly 5,555 times the price of one cup of coffee for this machine – and that doesn’t include the electricity, water, milk or cream, sweetener, coffee cups or coffee beans you will need to operate the machine and drink your beverage. Even without these (admittedly much lower) costs being factored in, you are paying the equivalent of well over fifteen year’s worth of coffee by the cup. And the differential between this method and coffee brewed at home on that $29.99 coffee maker is almost unbelievable…

Now, in fairness, this super-luxury coffee maker does appear to be an amazing piece of engineering. And true coffee snobs (or connoisseurs, as they would prefer you call them) insist that the difference between generic coffee beans prepared on your plastic $29.99 coffee maker and custom-roasted beans heated to exactly your perfect temperature and brewed to all of your personal specifications is comparable to the difference between a $500 bottle of wine and a pint of Thunderbird ($1.09 at your neighborhood liquor store). But considering that our old friends at the Dana Street Roasting Company will cheerfully roast your coffee to almost any specifications, and coffee makers with precision controls are available for only a few hundred dollars, this still seems excessive…

I should also admit that I’m not much of a coffee drinker myself, so even if somebody did offer me a cup of supercoffee I probably wouldn’t know the difference anyway. And it’s hard to deny that this purchase makes more sense than spending $200,000 on a bottle of whiskey that some people could probably finish off in an evening or two. But personally, given those choices, I’d still rather have lunch every day for three or four years – or a nice cup of diet cola every day for the next twenty-five years…