Coffee Snobs and Saving Addicts - Unite!

I drink between 2 and 3 cups of medium- to dark-roast coffee a day; I'm a Starbucks Gold Card holder; I receive Starbucks, Coffee-mate, and Bailey's non-alcoholic coffee creamer updates to my inbox; and my favorite coffee flavor is hazelnut. You could say that I enjoy my steamy brew. But the question I hear most often is "If you love coffee so much, why don't you have a Keurig?"

Answer: it all comes back to the budget.

While I have nothing against Keurigs (most of my family has them, my office has one, etc.) and I find them extremely convenient to use, I can't personally justify the expense. You're going to spend LEAST $70 for a Keurig - and that's if you're shopping sales and using coupons. Most range between $100 - $150, whereas you can purchase a regular 12-cup coffee pot for $20 or less. Or if you want to be MORE fancy, french presses range from $20-25.

But, machine aside, it's the expense of the pods that get you. (Not to mention that K-Cups waste an extreme amount of plastic.) Let's prove my point using math.

Here is the standard in K-Cup pricing:

At your standard grocery store, a box of 10 or 12 K-Cups is about $10. That's about $1/cup.
If K-Cups are on sale at the grocery store, it's usually about $7. That's at best, $.58/cup.
If you have a REALLY GOOD coupon, like a $1.50 off to use in conjuncture with that sale ($5.50/box), it takes it down to $.46/cup.

Now, granted, any of the above is a better price than a tall drip coffee at your local Starbucks. But let's assume I drink 3 cups of coffee a day. At $.46/cup, I'm looking at $45 a month drinking coffee from my home. The best price I've ever seen for K-Cups was $.35 each, and you don't come by that very often... but even still, that's $32 a month. [Note: I'm not sure of pricing at membership clubs like Costco or Sam's; I find it not worth the membership price and investment to run a household of 2!]


As we all know, I shop Publix, and the best part about Publix, besides it's customer-based culture, is the BOGO sales. And ground coffee OFTEN is included in these (though I've never seen K-Cups included...).

Ground coffee pricing; let's run it down:

One pound of ground coffee makes about 50 cups of joe.
A bag of one pound of coffee averages about $8 (or less!). That's $.16/cup
One pound of coffee, on BOGO at Publix, goes to about $4. That's $.08/cup
Now add in that $1.50 off coupon, making it $2.50 for 1 pound of coffee and $.05/cup.

Now, according to my calculator, that's $4.50 for an entire month's worth of coffee (drinking 3 cups a day). Recall our number for 3 K-Cups a day? $45? It's literally 10 times more expensive [TEN. TIMES.] to use the Keurig system than to use regular ground coffee.

And if you're not a couponer or sale-shopper, let me lay it out like this. For 50 cups of coffee, ground coffee will cost $8, and K-Cups will cost between $42 (12 per box) and $50 (10 per box)... Maybe not ten times more, but at least 4 to 5 times more expensive than grounds.

+ $40.50 per month NOT toward coffee = $486 per year toward debt.