K-Cups are a really interesting product to me as someone who loves coffee.
We have almost every different way of making coffee at our office (normal machine, chemex, french press, aeropress, big machine that grinds beans fresh and makes cup in ~40 sec) and people still use the K-cup machine.
I know that most of those methods are a bit more time intensive and daunting, but we have a big machine that makes a cup from fresh beans with one button push. I've talked to my co-workers and a lot of them simply like the K-cup coffee better. To me, it's almost objectively worse coffee, but people still love it.
I'm not sure whether it's branding or just what they're used to, but if you give people the option of coffee from a pot or from a k-cup, it seems they'll almost invariably choose the k-cup.
I'm a coffee nerd, but not a snob. I can enjoy a cup of Starbucks, gas-station coffee, and even be fine with a cup of instant.
I would choose any of those over the best Keurig I've tried. To me, the taste goes far beyond "not good" into "awful" territory.
But like you say, people genuinely like it. We added one to the waiting room of my wife's medical office, and from her patient's reactions you'd think we were giving them world-class coffee for free. I wonder if Keurig coffee is one of those weird foods like cilantro where only some people can taste the "awful".
We have almost every different way of making coffee at our office (normal machine, chemex, french press, aeropress, big machine that grinds beans fresh and makes cup in ~40 sec) and people still use the K-cup machine.
I know that most of those methods are a bit more time intensive and daunting, but we have a big machine that makes a cup from fresh beans with one button push. I've talked to my co-workers and a lot of them simply like the K-cup coffee better. To me, it's almost objectively worse coffee, but people still love it.
I'm not sure whether it's branding or just what they're used to, but if you give people the option of coffee from a pot or from a k-cup, it seems they'll almost invariably choose the k-cup.