> I can’t say the same about my coffee grinders. I use the plural because I’ve owned a lot of them, all bought in their original packaging and dead within a year

Grind size and consistency are everything when making coffee. As such, good coffee grinders are expensive as hell because of the blades and motors. Mostly the blades.

You can easily spend thousands on an espresso grinder (a grinder that can only grind ultra-fine espresso grounds, nothing else) because of this.

My Fellow Ode, which can only grind for drip coffee, was $300. It is a significant improvement from the Breville Smart Grinder I had previously, which was a significant step up from the Mueller single-speed, single-size grinder I started with.

I'm going to guess this was also the case 30 years ago, especially since they were bigger.