Comment by dkonofalski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkonofalski | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>It is because of hidden and opaque incentive structures that are completely misdirected.

While this is true, the parent is still true too. The issue is that companies make these cheap, easily broken devices and consumers keep buying them because the alternative is living with the inconvenience of not having that class of product. It's not a defeatist attitude, it's the truth. Unless people stop buying Keurig coffee-makers with dual functions, the data these companies are using for marketing and development show that that's what people buy.

The choice here is: If I don't want to support these cheap Keurig junk machines, do I just buy another cheap junk machine from someone else or do I buy a French Press and make my coffee the old-fashioned way in the morning? I'm trading convenience for quality. Despite what you think, that's still a choice that consumers make that fuels the race to the bottom.

> The issue is that companies make these cheap, easily broken devices and consumers keep buying them because the alternative is living with the inconvenience of not having that class of product.

"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

I'm familiar with the Boots theory but that's not really what I meant. Boots are a necessity. Coffee makers are a luxury.

those old porcelain hand cranked grinders offer just the right amount of exercise for the morning, you put it in a glass filter like professional coffee tasters use. Or at least, those are my thoughts/memories every day while I stand there waiting in front of my fully automatic machine that resembles an alien space ship.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com