Albert Burneko:
Of course, at any level even slightly more holistic than pure individualism, the Keurig looks quite different. The machine itself is exponentially more sophisticated and wasteful than even a commercial espresso maker, expensive to make and involving rare-earth computing materials and so forth. A box of plastic single-serving grounds containers (“K-Cups”) multiplies the packaging of a simple bag of coffee beans many times over. And then, to produce a quantity of coffee equivalent to that produced by, say, a single iteration of a drip coffeemaker’s brewing cycle, it must power through its much more mechanically elaborate brewing cycle over and over again, consuming electricity all the while, during which time it is of no use to anyone but the one person who will drink that serving of coffee. The farther back you pull from the immediate experience of one libertarian end-user unconcerned with anything beyond his own immediate experience, the worse it looks: For the individual, the Keurig has some claim to convenience and ease and efficiency; for, say, an office, or a household, it dramatically slows down and complicates the process of preparing coffee for everybody who wants some; for human society, it is a wasteful inefficiency; pound-for-pound, for terrestrial life as a global organism, if you are silly and sentimental enough to still entertain the idea of such a thing, it is an outrage.
On a related note, the NYT points out the high cost of coffee pods. We currently pay about 17 USD for a pound of La Colombe’s very good coffee.