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CEO of Silicon Valley's $400 Juicer Promises Refunds After Hand-Squeezing Demonstration (techcrunch.com)
Anthony Ha writes via TechCrunch: Jeff Dunn, the former Coca-Cola executive who became CEO of Juicero last year, has responded to a wave of coverage suggesting that the company's juice press isn't all that was promised -- and he's offering dissatisfied customers their money back. A Bloomberg report showed that Juicero's packs could be squeezed by hand, no expensive juicer required. Dunn's response? He doesn't deny that hand-squeezing is a very real possibility, but he does quibble about what you'll find inside, saying it's "nothing but fresh, raw, organic chopped produce" -- see, it's not juice yet because it hasn't been pressed. "What you will get with hand-squeezed hacks is a mediocre (and maybe very messy) experience that you won't want to repeat once, let alone every day," he argued. More importantly, he said, "The value of Juicero is more than a glass of cold-pressed juice. Much more." At the beginning of his post, Dunn said his goal was to "demonstrate the incredible value we know our connected system delivers." And if you're not convinced this is worth $400, well, there's another option for disillusioned Juicero buyers -- Dunn said the company's "Happiness Guarantee" (i.e. its return policy) has been extended to cover anyone who's ever purchased a Juicero Press. So for the next 30 days, anyone who's bought a Press should be able to return it for a full refund.
This article shouldn't be on this website.
Be seeing you...
"disillusioned Juicero buyers"
Why would he care if people used a machine or their hands to squeeze a $6+ per 8 oz serving juice pack? It's razors and blades - the profit is in the packs.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Remarkable news! You can skip the juice packs too and eat your vegetables and fruits using those whitish sharp things in your mouth.
That's for plebs.
I paid under $350 for a leading-brand horizontal masticating juicer and it cold-presses real raw vegetables that I buy from the store, no packs required.
It can even pure almond "milk" (juice) from raw almonds.
For convenience I use a potato slicer to prep most of the veggies. Quick, easy, fresh! No app or VC required.
But can you turn on your juicer from your phone while you're in the driveway so that it's done when you open your front door? That's worth $400 to absurdly wealthy people.
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No it's not. Absurdly wealthy people have butlers and/or housekeepers to do that for them.
... which will take centuries to decompose in landfill. So much for the eco living BS.
How about the CEO eliminates the word "cold-pressed" juice from any public discussion, since it's pretty much meaningless and one of the menu-enhancing words to make people think something is more elaborate or valuable than it is? When have you had juice that is not "cold-pressed"? It's all fucking "cold-pressed". So stop saying that.
It's like "Locally-sourced Niman Ranch charcoal-seared pork chop". A load of enhancement words that just try to make you think something more than it is. It's a fucking pork chop. It's fucking juice.
Yup.
Even buying "fresh" from the store and not washing it and refrigerating it does not help to keep it more than a couple of days (say 3 or 4 at most in my case, YMMV).
You must throw away lots of food
There's no bread let them squeeze juice
I paid nothing up front for my horizontal masticator, although it does need regular maintenance and twice daily cleaning.
The VitaMix is pretty amazing and while not cheap is built like a tank and very versatile. Need coffee beans ground? Soup made? ice cream? Smoothy? Rice flour from rice instead of buying expensive rice flour? It does all that and more. I concur with your assessment as to its value as well as to the noise it makes. It doesn't cut so much as beat to liquid since the blades are dull and rely on speed to do the work rather than sharpness. A plus is you can clean it if needed by hand without cutting yourself.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
In other news, VCs can be fucking stupid.
Or they think that consumers are fucking stupid, which is a pretty safe bet. The tricky thing is to find a way in which people will be predictably stupid which nobody has thought of exploiting before.
This thing is pretty much in the right ballpark; it's an attempt to exploit a cultural weakness: people want to add things to their lives that have the same effect as taking things out of their lives -- e.g. they want to eat something that will make them lose weight. Among the few things that actually fits that bill are vegetables. But if you're drinking vegetable juice you aren't eating vegetables any longer; you're eating pre-digested vegetable concentrate.
Trying to get the benefits of vegetables by reducing them to a convenient candy slurry you can slurp down quickly is futile, because many of the key benefits of vegetables that people are pursing are entailed in the fact that they take time to eat and are difficult to digest. But this does't make selling that proposition to consumers a bad idea. Setting consumer off on a futile quest can be profitable, which is why the cosmetic industry doesn't just pitch looking good -- it tells women they need to pursue eternal youth.
The trick is to package futility so it's convenient and price it/pitch it so that it is either an impulse buy or an object of intense longing. That's not easy. Keurig got all the parameters right, starting with the story they tell you about how your life will be different with their product. You get up in the morning in a caffeine-withdrawal fog, you pop the pod into the machine and your coffee comes out. Then you toss the pod in the trash. What they are selling is the will-o-the-wisp of convenience, and they've managed to sell it at a staggering markup. The truth is that it's just as easy to make that cup of coffee with an Aeropress, especially if you have an electric tea kettle, and it's a hell of a lot cheaper.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
But can you turn on your juicer from your phone while you're in the driveway so that it's done when you open your front door? That's worth $400 to absurdly wealthy people.
No it's not. Absurdly wealthy people have butlers and/or housekeepers to do that for them.
This is more likely aimed at moderately well-off people who buy drivel like this *because* they like to kid themselves that they're wealthy, and are most likely in serious debt as a result.
Reminds me of a BBC programme a few years back that looked at "nice" middle-class people with fairly well-paying jobs that were still up to their eyeballs in debt because they couldn't stop frittering their money away on inessential expensive nonsense. I watched this thinking "you're earning *how much* and you're still about to be declared bankrupt?!"
(Interestingly from a Slashdot point of view, IIRC at least one of the people had spent a ludicrous amount of money on stereotypical "geek" cruft, i.e. overpriced imported anime videos, related toys, etc. etc.)
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Was this a Kickstarter project?
The funny thing about that is those people is that most of us on Slashdot are "those people", scaled down. $35,000 puts you in the top 2% of income - we're the richest people in the world. Yet many of us squander it, making silly purchases *daily* like spending $6.50 on a cup of coffee, when coffee at the grocery store is 25 cents.
There are a couple of Slashdot regulars who are wealthy (have a lot) with incomes below $100,000, but not many.
Waring blenders (the silver one you see in bars) work better and last longer - and are about 1/3 the price.
I have had both.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
But can you turn on your juicer from your phone while you're in the driveway so that it's done when you open your front door? That's worth $400 to absurdly wealthy people.
Assuming you manually loaded a pack earlier, so it could sit there, un-refrigerated all day, ready to deliver that room-temperature drink at that command - yum.
(Having pre-chopped fruit and/or veggies in single-serving plastic packs delivered in chilled containers to you door seems pretty wasteful, btw.)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I think there are two problems, not enough people are marking these as 'spam', and we as readers aren't submitting enough of the articles appropriate for the site.
The problem with this is that if you submit several articles that are marked as spam, slashdot will lock your account. Vicious readers use this effect to harass legitimate submitters.
This happened to me - I was locked out from having several legitimate articles marked as SPAM, but then Slashdot management reversed the lockout. Now I'm 'kinda jaded about submitting articles.
I have to wonder how many legitimate submitters have been locked out... and got disheartened or felt there was no way to appeal or were driven away by the bad users.
Waring blenders (the silver one you see in bars) work better and last longer - and are about 1/3 the price.
I have had both.
While Waring makes some good products and start at around 200 vs 400 for a vitaMix, I find they are really 2 different products. If yo want to blend drinks a good Waring will do the job for less. However, I use my VitaMix for many other things, including grinding coffee beans, making soup, chopping vegetables, etc.; all things a blender will not do. It's best to match the device to its use.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
That's not easy. Keurig got all the parameters right, starting with the story they tell you about how your life will be different with their product. You get up in the morning in a caffeine-withdrawal fog, you pop the pod into the machine and your coffee comes out. Then you toss the pod in the trash. What they are selling is the will-o-the-wisp of convenience, and they've managed to sell it at a staggering markup. The truth is that it's just as easy to make that cup of coffee with an Aeropress, especially if you have an electric tea kettle, and it's a hell of a lot cheaper.
You can easily use ground coffee and make it Neapolitan-style or moka-style.
If you prefer the espresso, there are also al lot of electric coffee makers that use either ground coffee or ESE pods, like these or automatic grinding ones, like these.
If you look at coffee advertising either you have the advents for ground coffees or for proprietary pods and machines. Some coffee makers that also sell ESE pods are advertising proprietary pods.
I have an ESE and ground coffee machine and a moka and I absolutely like that I could chage type and brad of coffee without any problem
You actually physically go to a brick and mortar store to buy raw ingredients? What is this 2016? Why aren't you getting internet ordered pre packed juice packs to go with your pre processed meal replacement slop like the rest of us!
And let me preempt you, why would anyone this day and age have a lawn!
Note for the impaired: The above is sarcastic.
I find his backpedaling to be funny.
"What you will get with hand-squeezed hacks is a mediocre (and maybe very messy) experience that you won't want to repeat once, let alone every day"
Here's the funny part: you squeeze or press the (mostly liquid) contents through an opening that is small enough to fit in your mouth. If it's too messy to squeeze, you could very easily just suck it out through the package neck, or by inserting a 1 cent straw.
But I still wouldn't buy even the pouches, as they are 10 times the cost of buying and preparing fresh, Organic fruits and vegetables myself. And they don't even have much of a time saving factor, either, as preparing multiple servings of frozen slushy with a blender only takes a few minutes.
This whole product concept was badly conceived.
Oh, I suppose packets of veggies wouldn't last as long.
Carry on.
P.S. I boil the veggies in water before I toss them in the heap, cool the boiled water and use it on the plants (if you want).
I don't know why, but every time I see the word 'Juciero' I read it as 'Aviato' in TJ Miller's voice.
It really isn't as easy. I'm not saying using an Aeropress is hard. I own one myself and I think it's a great product. But if we use a car analogy an Aeropress is like a manual transmission, and a Keurig is like an automatic. It's not hard to see why people would be attracted to that ease - especially early in the morning before they've had coffee.
I can buy a giant 40lb bag of "juicing carrots" for $8 at the big grocery store, or a 30lb bag for $9 at the neighborhood store. It is pretty good compared to over $3 for 12oz of pasteurized juice.
If I really really wanted to, I could use place an order online for a local bicycle courier to purchase and deliver the items. But that would be embarrassing.
Live the dream! Sip Juicero while riding a Segway to your job at Snapchat. Don't forget the Google Glass!
You forgot cowboy coffee too if simple is what you want. There's an art to cowboy coffee too which takes some fussing to perfect, but once you find what works for you there's nothing simpler.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If I wanted to, yeah, I have a $6 wifi microcontroller on a breadboard next to me. Not sure what the relay costs, but not much. Thirty cents for a transistor to drive the relay, though that is overkill.
The harder part than turning it on from the driveway would be feeding the vegetables in from there.
But if I juiced it in the morning and put the juice in the fridge, then when I'm arriving in the driveway I can not use an app, and still walk into the kitchen and drink my juice right away without waiting. If I was that addicted to apping I could just use a journal app to dictate, "I'm in the driveway and I'm going to go inside and drink some juice."
Well, it's a matter of perception. Once you've mastered shifting a manual transmission it's not really any harder than an automatic, because the automatic is in your brain. Mindlessness gets a bum rap: the power of habit is that it makes things easy and the smart thing is to harness that power to make your life better. Now there's no reason to prefer a manual transmission over a modern automatic other than the pleasure of shifting if you enjoy such things, but there are plenty of reasons to prefer an Aeropress.
But as for the attraction -- well that's my point. They figured out a story to tell the consumers that sounds compelling, but if you factor in the lack of choice, cost, and waste, and the fact that you can quickly master the Aeropress drill so you can do it in your sleep, it's a bogus story. I used Aeropress as an example because it makes the right amount of conventional coffee quickly with practically no clean up beyond popping out the coffee puck and giving the thing a quick rinse. And if you absolutely must have that extra two minutes of speed it takes to heat the water in an electric tea kettle, spend the money that you would have spent on the Keurig on one of those Japanese tea water gizmos, set the timer to bring the water to temperature just before you wake up, and you can have your first cup ready in under two minutes.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
So everybody here is going "WTF? R U KIDDING ME?!?"
We should make ourselves available to VCs in everywhere. For a small fee, say $100,000, we could tell you what a dumbass idea something is and save you hundreds of millions of dollars!
instead of kickstarter, we'll call it shootdowner.com... hey the domain name is even available!
if you buy it, I expect a finders fee.
to me, the problem isn't a $400 wifi juicer. (lol, Silicon Valley). In theory, the juice packs is 10 oz of fresh fruit and vegetables and you need a 2 tons of pressure to extract 8oz of juice. In reality, it's 9 oz of juice (that you could buy at the store for $2 a gallon) and 1 oz of pulp. This is the most retarded thing since soylent. Anyone who spend $6 a drink for this shit is retarded. Hopefully the next batch will be laced with cyanide and you will die and the world will be a better place.
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It's not hard to see why people would be attracted to that ease - especially early in the morning before they've had coffee.
I find it hard to see why people would be attracted enough for that ease to pay that much for it. The difference in effort between an Aeropress and a Keurig is pretty tiny.
You only read the first two lines I posted didn't you.
Don't derp all over yourself because I didn't let you write my comment for me.
No, it wasn't. But the company they just filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against is: https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...
The funny thing is that the kickstarter juicer is clearly the superior product -- it's less expensive and lets you put your own mix of produce in the bag that it squeezes.