Friday, August 12, 2011

The Economics of Coffee

For Christmas last year, I bought Mr. Sam a Keurig single cup coffee machine .   He makes a single cup of coffee each morning to take with him and on the weekends we'll each have a cup.  I get my coffee, during the week, at work (which has an industrial Keurig coffee machine).

The Keurig system works great, but the coffee pods can be expensive, ranging in price from @ .70 to more than a dollar a pod.  So we don't use pods at home, instead we buy good coffee and use the my K cup which allows one to simply use their own coffee in a mini filter cup.

Recently, I was in a Dunkin Donuts store (my favorite coffee) and noticed they were now selling coffee pods of DD coffee. I thought that was interesting, wouldn't they be undermining their customer base by offering such an easy option for home brewing?  But then I noticed the price, $13.99 for a box of 14 pods, basically $1 a pod.  The price for hot coffee in the retail store starts at about $1.20 for a small.  So the pods are about the same price, of course a pod will work for a large or an extra large serving and you save on gas and time.

My favorite pod flavor at work is "Donut Shop" which I think mimics the flavor of Dunkin coffee.  Amazon.com has a 50 pack of the Donut Shop pods for $30 or .60 a pod, that is the best price I've seen in the pods.

We will probably stick with our current system of simply using our favorite coffee in the my K cup, that is the cheapest option and the coffee is good. 

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

We leave near Seattle.... Starbucks Country and of course we are addicted to "good" coffee. Love Starbucks. However weekdays we brew a pot from our big bag of Kirkland brand coffee from Costco and put in travel mugs for the trip in to work. If I am out and about during the morning I will typically get an Americano at Starbucks to keep me going. Weekends are similar, drink the Kirkland at home but if passing a Starbucks we will stop in.