Ragging on Starbucks and extolling the virtues of your $900 coffee grinder is a social ritual in the coffee-snob community. That is 'what you do' if you are the kind of person who uses coffee to elevate themself above the peasants. It's no different from Vodka snobbery and many other herd behaviors.
I might be interested in a $900.00 coffee grinder if it came with a lifetime warranty, overnight replacement, and a replacement policy that didn't rival planning the first manned mission to Mars in complexity.
It also would have to have at least two grinds: one for drip and one for espresso. I don't need 40 different grinds or infinitely-variable grinds. I need two that actually work. Most commercial machines only have one. That's the main reason I don't just buy a commercial machine and be done with it. A secondary reason is because I'm not wholly convinced that the commercial machines are any better than the consumer ones in terms of durability.
My observation has been that all coffee grinders up to the ~ $300.00 price point will fail shortly after the warranty expires (if they even last that long); so the only things that matter are how well they work out of the box and how nice they look on the counter. I've had el-cheapo ones and high-end ones, and they all fail. The longest I've ever gotten out of one was 15 months.
Among the many failed grinders I have in my collection are two identical Cuisinart grinders. One of them has inconsistent grind size, possibly due to bad burrs, and was itself a second- or maybe third-iteration replacement from Bed, Bath and Beyond. The other Cuisinart was purchased elsewhere, failed after five months (bad motor), and is still under warranty. I'm debating whether to return the one with the failed motor under the warranty, or cannibalize it to fix the one with the presumably bad burrs and keep the resulting cannibal machine as a spare for when the Krups grinder that is currently in service inevitably fails.
I could also return the one with the inconsistent grind to Bed, Bath, and Beyond; but seriously, how many times is it reasonable to expect them to replace the same purchase? They didn't make the thing, after all.
Cannibalizing would certainly be the least-expensive option. I'd have to pay the shipping both ways to use the Cuisinart warranty, and I'd have to drive a hundred miles to replace the one I bought from Bed, Bath, and Beyond. That the $50.00 Krups grinder that presently is in service will eventually fail is practically a given, so having the Cuisinart cannibal as a spare would be a nice backup and might be the most sensible option.
As for the Krups, it actually does a
very nice job of grinding, but it reportedly has a high failure rate. I bought it as an emergency replacement for the Cuisinart with the bad motor. But it actually produces a surprisingly nice grind. It also has a two-year manufacturer warranty and an additional Square Trade warranty that I only bought because the nitwit cashier at Wally World told me it was a walk-in replacement sort of warranty. (It isn't.) I kept the warranty anyway because it was only $4.00 and because Square Trade often refunds small-ticket purchases rather than repairing or replacing them.
Transplanting the burrs (and the gears, if practical) from the newer Cuisinart with the failed motor into the older Cuisinart with the inconsistent grind would be easy and would provide a serviceable backup for when the Krups inevitably fails. It also would prevent me from having to use my tertiary backup: a <gasp> blade grinder </gasp> that one of my nieces bought for me.
But I do long for a grinder that was truly built to last, and I would pay handsomely for one if I believed that such a unicorn actually existed.
In short, like coffee itself, the quality of coffee grinders has little to do with the price -- at least up to the ~ $300.00 price point. They all fail.
Rich
