Geen Mountain Coffee Corporation are a bunch of "shit asses". For the two dozen people in the world who don't know who they are, they make those Keurig coffee brewers and pimp those little k-cup varieties of coffee.
Fortunately for Green Mountain, America is chocked full of lemmings who will get in line to buy the latest craze. And sometimes that craze can overcome the failings of a bad product. And one only need to go to Amazon.com and read the product reviews on these brewers.
Now, a business either succeeds or fails in the long run, based on how they execute their business plan. And they really have only two choices; make an attractive half-ass product and lasso the lemmings and get them to fork over big money for their product. Or, secondly, invent a great product, continue to make improvements on it, and license out the technology so that other companies pay a fee for making like products based on outstanding technology.
Green Mountain Coffee has chosen to adopt the former business plan. Produce a rather cool looking coffee brewer that has the looks of a low slung sexy sports car, make the brewer with the cheapest possible materials, guard your patent as if it were golden, make a dozen different models that all do essentially the same thing, then rake in huge profit margins from the lemmings.
The problem with Green Mountain's strategy is that eventually the lemmings wake up and realize they've been duped. After experiencing brewer failures, mugs only half filled, coffee that comes out only half brewed, even the lemmings start complaining.
Another problem with Green Mountain's strategy is that, eventually, the patent expires on their product and competitors come in, invest a few extra pennies into making a quality brewer, and Green Mountain is left wondering what the hell happened.
So, I read this morning that Green Mountain Coffee came out with their latest earnings report. The company has had to lower profit projections as fewer coffee brewers were sold during this past holiday season. Analysts are also expecting competition from other brewer makers to heat up as Green Mountain's patent expired last September. Finally, people are realizing a cute coffee brewer sitting on the counter isn't cute if it doesn't work. So their stock price is tumbling.
However, the real reason is that Green Mountain Coffee has chosen to exploit their customers, selling a product for more than twice what it's worth, and failing to use those enormous profits to fix the flaws that prevail in all of their brewers. Every year they come up with another model that does the same thing the old model's did, with the same fatal flaws, then jack the price up to $250 bucks so that you can enjoy lukewarm coffee in under a minute.
And do we even have to talk about the costs of those k-cups?
I've got a Bunn coffee maker. It is not sleek, it is not sexy, it is quite ugly. It makes superb coffee. It makes an entire pot of coffee in less than two minutes. Bunn's technology is so superior their brewers are used in virtually every restaurant in America. I have to buy a new one every ten years, at about half the cost of the Keurig Vue.
So, my "shit ass" award for today goes to Green Mountain Coffee Company. Wipe and Flush.
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