Keurig Cost vs Starbucks vs Home brew
We at Delightful coffee are all about coffee, and also cost, so for the sake of this article we'll looks at the large scale cost differences of having a cup made by a Keurig machine on average, versus visiting Starbucks, versus using your drip maker at home. Read on for more...
Environmental Sense
1st things first, lets speak of environmental costs. Millions of Keurig K-Cups end up in landfills a year, that is a face. Millions of Starbucks cups end up in landfills each year. With home brew drip, however, usually only the filters and the coffee grounds get discarded, but did you know that both the grounds and the filter can be added to your compost pile? Or you can simply keep your grounds and add them to your yard or garden! The grounds will get absorbed into the soil, become part of it, they will help make the soil more granular and absorbent, and besides all that, plants love it! Particularly rose bushes. Another thing you can do once you have discovered this, you can ask your local coffee joint, like Starbucks, to save the grounds for you for gardening use.
You could also recycle your Keurig grounds, but really, how messy would that get? Unless you use those refillable plastic Keurig K-cup replacements you will have to remove the foil on each cup and dump out the grounds. Every. Single. Time.
Dollars and Cents (sense).
Today at the local grocery store, Stater Brothers, I did some comparison shopping. Keurig K-Cups "pods" per unit, cup, generally cost 59¢ to 89¢ a unit. So you have the reusable mug that you love, you pour in water into the Keurig if the reservoir is low, tap in this instance but you could use bottles water, which only ups the cost. then you turn it on, wait for it to heat up, a couple minutes max, meanwhile you insert your coffee pod, press down the lid, feel the satisfying pressure of the foil top getting punctured, and when fully heated you press the start button. Delightful coffee follows right after!
Now you also have to figure in that you spent between $89 and $277 for this single cup brewer to the unit cost too, so lets say an average unit cost of $110.00 divided by what, maybe 1000 uses, that there is .11¢ per cup. So your final cost per cup is between .70¢ and $1.00 a cup.
Starbucks Coffee
This place has way more than just coffee, in fact I suspect most people do not order regular coffee, I'm usually that only guy in the crown who gets plain coffee. Most everyone else buys the froo-froo drinks, which run between 4 to 5 bucks a CUP. No thank you. They are good, but if it's not black coffee, (or a venti egg nog latte) I want nothing to do with it.
So a cuppa, what's it cost here? Between $1.85 and $2.45 as of this writing, this straight from the Starbucks website. And the other coffee joints, are they less? Not really. Your best bet for good coffee when out and about is Denny's, one would think, but that's no great bargain either. you would have thought they, with a large kitchen space and a large food and coffee presence for decades and decades would have sparked the coffee revolution rather than some weirdly named Seattle native.On the plus side, you can buy Starbucks k-cups to use in your Keurig. I guess that was SB's way of not loosing market share.
Home brew Coffee
As you may have read elsewhere on this site, my drip brewed coffee at home costs me .12¢ a cup. Max. I have my reusable cup and thermos. And I can use my grounds in the garden. Seems to me that is a winner, even if I have a wait a few minutes for that first cup.
