Let us do some arithmetic that nobody does.
A K-Cup pod holds somewhere around nine to twelve grams of ground coffee. Call it eleven.
A pound of coffee is about 454 grams. So a pound is roughly forty pods worth of coffee.
At typical pod prices, that same pound of coffee costs you somewhere in the range of forty to sixty dollars once it is packed into plastic cups.
You can buy very good whole bean coffee for a fraction of that.
So a Keurig customer is paying several times the price of the coffee for the privilege of not measuring it.
And it works. Tens of billions of pods are sold annually. The machines are in offices, hotels, break rooms and a very large share of American kitchens.
Now here is the part that makes this story genuinely unusual.