MOPS AND COFFEE or CAPITALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS
I thought the deal was that “privately owned productive enterprises, in a highly competitive marketplace, will produce ever-better quality products and services at ever-lower cost to the consumer.” What happened to that? Isn’t this the story we tell ourselves? Isn’t this the overwhelmingly positive side of capitalism, and what separates it from other systems? Yet, with very few examples of this in the real world you wonder how such a myth persists. In fact, there are almost countless counter-examples of products and services actually going in the opposite direction: getting significantly worse and more expensive in the process. Just look around. A great number of examples are immediately at hand even in your own home.
Look, for instance, at the humble mop. Here you have a simple pile of cotton braids attached to a solid wooden handle. Perfect. Easy. Works a treat. Very little to break or fail. Just add soapy water (or bleach or vinegar or whatever you have available, and a little elbow grease) and you’ve got a clean floor in a jiffy.
Now what have we done to improve upon the mop? Virtually nothing. Yet if you watch TV or shop at any number of popular stores you’ll have come across the Swiffer WetJet. This product purports to be an exciting innovation, an “all-in-one mopping solution” everyone needs in their home.
What you have here is a conglomeration of ten plastic parts making up the main body of the device. The handle is three metal shaft segments, each connected to the next by more flimsy plastic. A flexible plastic connector fixes the multi-part handle with the plastic holster-like fluid dispenser and the mop’s base. It’s the very definition of a contraption. In addition, the mop’s fluid dispenser is battery powered, of course, and “requires four non-rechargeable AA batteries” just for the mop to function properly. On top of this, you are supposed to buy Swiffer’s proprietary cleaning fluid, as it comes in form-fitting bottles that insert directly into the mop’s dispensing unit. As you’d expect, Swiffer suggests this washing fluid is a “specially designed cleaner solution formulated to break up & dissolve tough messes”. (Another name for such a miraculous alchemical brew, one that miraculously powers though stubborn dirt and grease, is soap. Available in a kitchen near you.) Further, if you want to use the device as intended, you need to purchase Swiffer’s own disposable scrubbing pads. You’re told these special scrubbing pads “trap and lock in dirt with over 200 microscrubbers.” Now I may be wrong but this, to me, is the definition of a mop and not something unique to the Swiffer. Every traditional mop head is made up of many cotton braids, each composed of several entwined strands that twist and scrub at the floor, trapping filth within their fibrous, hydrophilic mass. However, unlike a traditional mop, Swiffer’s scrubbing pads attach to the unit via little, poor quality Velcro pads that fail when wet and dirty and wear out quickly with use.
What really confuses me about this product is that it doesn’t even appear to be “recreating the wheel”, so to speak; instead, what you have here is a company taking a solid product, something that works well, breaking it apart into many needless, flawed, and failing components and then repackaging and marketing it as something incalculably better than the original.
What’s more, it should be clear to everyone that the Swiffer manages to create far more waste than it ever removes. With the Swiffer you go through batteries, piles of disposable pads, and many more plastic cleaning fluid containers than you ever would using any other floor cleaning tool. And, of course, you also have a mopping system that needs replacement in a fraction of the time of the tool it seeks to replace.
Despite all of the above the Swiffer isn’t even a cheaper option. Rather than spending $20 on a mop and bucket (that work perfectly, have multiple uses, and may very well last a lifetime) you spent $30 on the device (contraption) alone. Then to that you added $5 for batteries, $10 for a few single-use pads, and another $5 for a small amount of cleaning fluid. So you spent at least $50 on what is essentially an elaborate piece of junk, one you’ll need to continually put money into to operate every month before it falls apart and dies prematurely.
Just for the moment, let’s pretend all of this is just fine: you’re happy paying more and the device works well for you. And let’s also pretend the Swiffer is in fact the tremendous and powerful cleaning revolution it claims to be. Even if this is the case, I ask you, what kind of outrageous mess are you making on a regular basis that would justify such a remarkable device? I’d argue that if you need so much floor cleaning power you’re probably using the wrong tool altogether. What you really need is a vacuum, a pressure-washer, or a hazmat team – or to just take your filthy business outdoors, you goofball!
Sadly this complexification, ruination, and over-pricing phenomena is not unique to cleaning supplies. Let’s look at something totally different. What about coffee brewing?
When it comes to making coffee nothing could be simpler or more perfect than the humble coffee press. Two tablespoons of your favourite grounds are placed into a glass container along with a few cups of hot water. Just a couple minutes later you plunge a simple and durable steel filter through the brew to separate grounds from delicious blackened steep. The press produces perfect coffee, cleans up quickly and easily, and lasts a lifetime. No excess, no batteries, no power cord, no proprietary filters or coffee, no operating system, no wireless network connectivity, and no petroleum products bathing in your beverage. And you can find one of these on sale almost anywhere, and have been able to since the 1930s, for between $10 and $60 depending on how much coffee you want to make at one time and how solid you want your press to be.
There has been virtually no improvement in coffee making in over eighty years; and yet here comes the Keurig Brewing System 2.0. Off the top we know that Keurig has taken a perfect coffee brewing tool, like the coffee press, and re-imagined it as a “system”. (At this point your bullshit detector should be sounding and you should probably be running screaming in the other direction…)
Starting at $140 the Keurig (B.S. 2.0) takes the simple and elegant coffee press and replaces its clean glass and steel with plastic, layer upon layer of cheap and stinky plastic. To all of this moulded petroleum Keurig adds an illuminated water reservoir (oooh!), a touchscreen display with customizable wallpapers (ahhh!), coffee strength controls, machine maintenance alerts, and their exclusive Keurig 2.0 Brewing Technology™ (ohhh!). The $200 version gives you a colour display and a customizable multi-coloured night light – all very obviously essential to brewing really great coffee.
So if you bought this you spent at least twice, but maybe as much as twenty times, as much for your coffee-maker than you would for a coffee press. But you haven’t made any coffee yet. Remember, this is a “system”. So, if you’re going to brew coffee with your new coffee-maker you’re required to purchase low quality plastic cups (“k-cups”) filled with a single-serving of low quality coffee. (Low quality, given that by design, no matter what type you’ve chosen to buy, this system passes boiling water, under pressure, into and through a cheap, soft, plastic cup. You know nothing says fresh like steaming plastic!)
Tragically, that’s just the beginning. It’s not just that you’ve chosen to drink poor quality coffee, while saving yourself no time or energy (that may be just fine by you, I don’t know) you’ve also chosen to drink what is by far the most expensive poor-quality coffee on the market. No? Just do the math.
I did. I found that a bag of specialty roasted beans at Starbucks typically goes for around $20 a pound. Real coffee snobs will go for a more exclusive product, something like a single-origin espresso from Ethiopia, say, or a selection of La Cima beans, grown at the renowned Guatemalan plantation Finca el Injerto and roasted at a local specialty roaster. These beans cost around $30 per pound. (And some would argue this is the best coffee on the planet.) Now with these numbers in mind, $20 or $30, we’ll look at the cost of Keurig’s k-cups.
So what does a pound of Keurig coffee cost? Well, there are many varieties out there, but for a typical inexpensive variety (let’s go with twelve servings of Folgers Black Silk) it’s around $11. So, doing the conversion ($11 divided by 12 coffee pods) it looks like it costs $0.91 per pod. And with roughly eight grams of coffee in your average k-cup coffee pod, and 454 grams in a pound, it works out to 56.75 servings from a pound of coffee. Now to find out the per pound cost of these k-cups we multiply 56.75, the number of servings in a pound, by the cost of each serving, $0.91, which gives us $51.64 for a pound for Folgers Black Silk. This means that, even if you find a great deal on k-cups and pay half this amount, you’re still opting for some of the poorest quality coffee on the planet, brewed in the worst way imaginable, for the price of a coveted premium coffee.
And yet the situation is worse still. You’re not just drinking extremely expensive, poor quality coffee, you’re also consuming it in the most wasteful way imaginable. Because each coffee pod makes only a single cup of brew, the waste produced by this system is significantly more than any coffee brewing method ever conceived. And even if you were willing to pay more for bad coffee and were happy to produce more waste while doing so, like most people you’d probably still want to recycle some of that junk. However, as these little plastic cups come with a mixed foil and paper cap and a paper filter bag inside, k-cups aren’t even recyclable. But of course it’s not just the k-cups that are a waste problem. With all of its plastic and electronics (all of which are bizarrely excessive) a Keurig will break down more easily than other coffee brewing tools and methods and cannot be repaired or have its parts swapped out with those of any other product. And, given the limited one year warranty, not only does the company not have much faith in its own product but, as a result, you can’t even expect to get much use out of your extremely expensive, poor quality coffee contraption.
I feel like the popularity of such devices speaks volumes, as it must, about where we’re at as a society and where we’re headed. Both places are pretty sad. I think we can do better.
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