Specifically at grocery stores.
This weekend I was grocery shopping, and it occurred to me whilst attempting to find the one or two whole bean offerings amid the sea of pre-ground coffee and k-cups that I haven’t seen coffee grinders in a grocery store in years. It feels like, growing up through the 90s and early aughts, most stores would have at least a few options to grind fresh, or at least the Bakers near my home did. However, at some point, they were seemingly removed everywhere.
Of course, my intuition tells me that it benefits stores to not have such specialized machinery in place so as to allow maximum flexibility with store layout, but I’m curious if anyone has an inside scoop.
I can think of a lot of reasons for it.
- The machines take up a lot of space, and create a lot of mess.
- Pods have taken over a huge chunk of the pre-ground market.
- More people than ever have grinders at home.
- Packaging of pre-ground coffee is better than it used to be - better sealing containers, and fresher coffee to start with.
- The huge variety of coffee brands means that what you would get out isn’t what you put in.
There just isn’t much of a need for people who want to buy whole beans but grind them before getting home anymore. People will either buy whole beans and grind at home, buy ground coffee in a well-sealed container, or buy pods of some form.
I want to know why people who would buy whole beans would grind them in the store.
I often wish that you couldn’t even buy the same brands of coffee either ground or whole bean. The disappointment of accidentally getting a bag of pre ground coffee at some random coarseness is real.
Covid-19 pandemic.
The grocery stores near me have taken down their coffee grinders during the pandemic. They had signs posted saying: “Temporarily Closed for Sanitary Reasons due to Covid-19”.
When lockdown ended, the coffee grinders were covered in in plastic and the signs were re-phrased to: “Temporarily Unavailable until Further Notice.”
Then one day it was all gone. The store employees and managers said at first that it was because of Covid, then a few months later they said it was ‘upper management’ decision – this was for both corporate and family-owned stores.
EDIT: I forgot to mention that I ended up buying a Cuisinart coffee grinder at this family-owned grocery store chain (they’re popular in parts of Canada and upstate New York).
It’s sadly a common thing. Something gets removed temporarily and people realize they like not having to deal with it better than the perceived benefits it offers.
Others have mentioned many reasons, and while they do still exist in specialty groceries, they’ve died off because they are just bad.
Anyone spending good money on good coffee knows the in-store grinders will taste like all the crap-flavored beans the past 12 people put through them.
Even with unflavored grinds your supposed to grind some and toss it just to clear the old stuff out.
Our Wegmans always had 2 grinders, one was supposed to be dedicated to flavored beans, and the other was supposed to remain “pure”. The grinders were still there about 3 years ago when they re-organized the entire store. I don’t remember if I’ve seen the grinders after the re-model. I’ll check next time I’m there.
The grocery store I go to has a massive wall of whole beans and the grinders are right next to them. Always like trying different flavors out.
I would suggest getting your own grinder. Beans going through that thing probably have 31 flavors in them by the time they’re ground.
Mmm… Baskin-Robbins roast
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
I like flavored coffee on occasion. We have two grinders, the slightly lower quality one gets all the flavored beans, they never go into the good grinder.
That said, I got a handful of flavors recently to share with friends. I like to bring our espresso machine glamping, I set it up on a table under a tarp next to our tent, with a 100 foot cord running to a small generator.
When I got home, I tried mixing a little bit of each flavor together. 5 flavors,a few beans from each. It was honestly terrible. Far worse than any individual flavor by itself. It wasn’t unique or interesting, it was bad, and I’ll never do it again 🤷♂️
Edit: That said, while I would never put flavored beans in the flavor free grinder, as a matter of principle… I’ve never noticed a problem when changing from one flavor to another in the flavored grinder. So I doubt the grocery store grinder would affect the flavor that much 🤷♂️
Oh wow! That’s even more expensive a selection than I remember. Is this a chain, or a local store?
H-E-B Central Market. It’s a Texas chain.
Wow! Not sure I’ve seen one even half that long!
I do not drink coffee in any capacity. Why do some of them require “employee assistance” and others don’t??
my guess is those ones are damaged or something and have to be opened from the top instead
Dispensers were damaged, so if you tried to dispense it, it’d end up all over the floor.
(Nah, really they just exceed the daily allowed amount of caffeine and require a prescription to dispense)
Yeeeeaaaaahhhh!
Poeple who buys coffee beans already have the required hardware at home nowadays.
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I suspect you are right right in mentioning single serve waste producing machines.
I think there has been a greater split between those who tolerate crappy coffee and those who don’t - the crappy coffee people have moved to the expensive single serve machines, and the people who are picky grind at home (and probably also don’t buy at the grocery store). The rest evidently use pre-ground. Plus, the grinder at the grocery store isn’t cleaned regularly. I have distinct memories of them smelling like the flavoured coffee, which, today, I find revolting.
The gap between commodity coffee and snobby coffee has grown, and the availability of snobby coffee has grown between the multitude of roasters and online shopping. If it’s, say, $10 for a bag of premium coffee beans that’s of unknown age (at least 2 months) and lists only “south American” as its origin, or $15 for a bag of 3 day old locally roasted beans from a specific farm in Colombia, I’d go for the latter. I think my prices are a good 10 years old, but let’s just use it as an example.
Ironically the k-cups are quite a bit more expensive than that.
The in store grinders are still around in some stores.
Bags / cans of pre-ground is also on the decline in my neck of the woods. The exception being pods. Half of my coffee aisles are pods.
I feel like most people are in one of two large camps. Whole bean people with grinders or self grinding machines, and pod people.
The pre-ground bag / can people are an increasingly small slice of the pie.
Funny enough, you want your coffee to off gas for some time after roasting. That’s why there are those little vents in the bags. Three days old coffee will foam a lot and taste off.
I don’t know how big the bags are you are buying, but I’m buying one kilo for between 20 and 50 Euro. Depending on how fancy I want it to be. But that’s hand-picked, fair trade, single origin coffee.
I think your intuition is probably right, but also Amazon happened. You can get a grinder delivered to your house in a day or two for like $10. Nobody who cares about fresh-ground coffee is going to hesitate to invest in a grinder when it costs less than a bag of beans.
You can even get a workable burr grinder for ~$40.
That’s a bean slicer though, go the full mile and buy a burr grinder, a used pro one will last a lifetime too.
You can still get one pretty cheap
This is interesting… I was not into coffee before COVID so I didn’t notice it before, wonder if it was indeed because of the pandemic as others mentioned
I don’t think Trader Joe’s is exactly a popular brand on Lemmy due to unrelated reasons, but if there is a Trader Joe’s near you, would you mind checking if they still have coffee grinders? I do vividly remember that my local Trader Joe’s store had one. Also I’m pretty sure most coffee roasters would still grind the beans for you (not that most serious coffee enjoyers ever use that service, but still)
I don’t shop at Trader Joe’s because it’s outside of my budget, but I have friends that do. I’ll be sure to ask them. Their niche as what I guess I’d call a “boutique grocery store” would seemingly allow for coffee grinders in-shop, if for no other reason than I think it appeals to what I’d imagine their key demographic is.
Sooo I guess since others mentioned this, I would like to clarify a few things…
TJ is indeed marketed as a “boutique” grocery store, and I think I heard somewhere that their founder made the store in a way where their ideal customer would be a rich kid who graduated from Harvard (not kidding). But they have been bought by Aldi a while back and follow a similar business model. Because of this, their prices are quite reasonable especially for how “high-class” they feel. Drawback is that TJs tend to have incomplete offerings, but are really well-stocked and reasonably priced on essentials and some trendy stuff (for example, vegan food: I’m not kidding they had more tofu than the nearby mainstream grocery chains)
I thought folks here would hate TJ not because the price, but because of their union busting practices (I won’t judge anyone for shopping there, but it’s just a good thing to know)
I wonder if you accidentally conflated Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. Whole Foods is the $12.99 half gallon of milk and free-range virgin clover honeybee excretion that can’t legally be called honey.
TJ’s isn’t boutique, though. Before I actually shopped there, I conflated it with Fresh Market for years, but it turned out they were far and away the cheapest grocery option anywhere near me until we got Aldi.
I shop Aldi more now because our TJ’s is always so busy, but since they’re all store-brand, their prices are still usually on the low side (other than meats).
WTF you talking about? TJs is mid or even lower price grocery.
Decreased demand.
- People who want something simple often use pods.
- People that buy whole bean are more likely to have grinders at home.
- In places like the US, especially on the coasts, many people have finally learned what good coffee tastes like, and it usually doesn’t come from pre-ground coffee.
Pre-ground coffee is also on the decline in my neck of the states. Almost all of the packaged coffee is whole bean because people have grinders.
For example I’m all of the above
- to keep things simple I use pods
- when I want something nice I have a grinder at home
- I do know at least a bit what makes good coffee the way I like it
But also a grinder at the store may have unknown cleanliness as well as a mix of different styles and flavors and ages. If you care about good coffee, that’s not it.
But yeah, that means there is so much I’ll never try because trying doesn’t justify buying a full bag
the only grocery around me that had one took it out when they quit selling coffee that way, a few months into covid.
I was thinking exactly this: it’s a sanitation issue, and I’m pretty sure that any store that still had them got rid of them during Covid.
Personally, I refused to use them. I’ve worked in both service and hospitality, and I know how gross people are, even when they don’t mean to be.
We also have a less people capable of maintaining/repairing those machines. Parts are probably harder to get.
Expensive too thanks to the moron tariffs.
Costco is my go-to place for coffee, and they still have them. However, I don’t use them, I bought a burr grinder. I prefer grinding the coffee beans right before brewing.
My local Costco stopped selling whole bean Pete’s Major Dickason’s blend. I asked why and got the answer that “we removed our grinders.” Lame. No one else can possibly have their own grinder and want to grind their beans fresh daily.
Well that’s annoying, hasn’t happened at my Costco yet but I may have to get coffee somewhere else if they do that at my store.
They disappeared like pay phones, restaurants giving mints and toothpicks, and public water fountains.
Covid really killed a lot of stuff.
I have memories of them being featured on supermarket sweep as well.
