Disruptive Coffee

There is a term used in the industrial world, "disruptive technology."  Disruptive technology is the contemporary analogy to what the old Total Quality Management movement meant when they referred to "paradigm shifts", the approaches to doing things differently, or looking at them differently, vs. the way we have done something or thought of something, for a long time.

A technology is disruptive when it changes the paradigm in which we do something, so regularly that we would otherwise take it for granted, leaving behind it an obsoleted predecessor that we come to laugh at, like the telephone booth, or the typewriter, or one day, socialism.

Or the coffee pot.

The workplace environment was once populated by the ubiquitous coffee machine, with the equally ubiquitous glass pots with never enough coffee left or, if the office was populated by salesmen, no coffee left in them but a layer of char at the bottom of the pot and the smell of javanesque napalm permeating the air.

So I pause from my daily screeds on the incompetence of college administrators, on the secrecy of Hillary Clinton and the scourge of Obamacare to salute -- Salud! -- the disruptive technology that makes my life fractionally easier when I'm paying my health insurance bill doubled by Obamacare.

I refer, of course, to the Keurig machine.

Yes, I salute you, o ye single-cup coffee brewer and your K-cups.  I salute the fact that from here in my upstairs home office I can walk downstairs and, at a whim, literally make a cup of coffee up to 14 ounces.  And that coffee flavor can be amaretto, wild mountain blueberry, chocolate cannoli, chocolate mint, chocolate chip cookie, gingerbread, hazelnut, cinnamon roll, maple, or french toast.  There are K-cups for each and every one of those flavors in a rack next to the brewing machine here and, thanks to the ability to buy them by the large box, they go about 40 cents a cup.

Remarkably, each time I order K-cups from the online retailer now owned by Keurig themselves, as many as five more new flavors appear, and I start to get antsy until the FedEx person arrives with them.  Each time I brew a cup of delightful cinnamon roll or amaretto coffee -- and they are delightful -- I think how much better coffee has become without the messy glass pots with their charred bottoms.

Maybe there is something romanticized about glass coffee pots in places like police departments and car dealerships.  Let them be consigned to old movies.  Coffee in the 21st Century has been transformed as surely as surely can be.  "Keurig" is, of course, a Dutch word meaning "proper" and, Lord knows, nothing is more proper than not having a pot to clean.

Oh, yeah, they make K-cups with ordinary unflavored coffee.  Who cares?

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton