Consumer Revolt

I am not a morning person. I am not a person who rolls out of bed and is ready to run the moment his feet hit the floor. I am a person who depends on advanced preparation and a routine to navigate through the mental fog of my first waking moments. Before I go to bed at night I set up my coffee maker, and I plan my breakfast. I then lay out the clothes I am going to wear the next day. The next morning I turn on the coffee maker on my way to the bathroom. I do not depend on the coffee maker to turn on automatically for the same reason that I do not depend on an electric alarm clock. Power outages are frequent enough to make electric clocks and the clock on the coffee maker too undependable. One would think that my caution would assure me of a nice, hot cup of coffee when I finish in the bathroom. For most of my adult life it did, but of late I have been sabotaged by the shoddy quality of coffee makers. There is nothing more frustrating than finding that the damned coffee maker has failed at that hour in the morning. This is particularly true when the woman of the house has had one of her occasional fits of neatness and the system used to make coffee when the power goes out is no longer where it has been stored for the last thirty years. Believe me, I am in no mood to search for such things at five o’clock in the morning!

The thing is that I have not been able to find a coffee maker at any price that will last longer than a few months. It is not just the price of replacing those devices that has made me so angry it is also the disappointment and inconvenience. Coffee makers are not convenient when they do not work! I believe the frequent failures of coffee makers are intentional efforts to make you replace them frequently. My response to this is an extended middle finger. I have now bought a French press. There are few parts in this devise that can fail because you heat the water for them on the stove. I might add that they are also considered the best way to make good coffee. The one draw back is that they do not make many cups of coffee at the same time. I am solving that problem by using my old camping equipment when I want to make more than a few cups of coffee at the same time. I have a pot in which I heat the water on the stove. I then pour the hot water into a funnel that contains the filter and the coffee grounds, and the liquid seeps down into the pot from which the finished product can be poured. It is primitive, but the coffee thus produced is as good as the coffee produced by modern drip style coffee makers.

I know not what course other consumers will take, but give me dependability or lose my business! May the companies who manufacture a planned obsolescence into their products suffer an unplanned loss of their market.

First published in macsbackporch.com on Jan. 26, 2011