Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze
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@Polygeekery said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
$50, does the same thing
It might produce the same juice but that's gonna need washing up. The main selling point I can see of the Juicero one is that you can presumably just throw out the bag, and wipe or maybe rinse the nozzle of the juicer.
I'm not saying that makes it worth $400, mind, but then I wouldn't pay $50 for a juicer. I just eat the damn fruit.
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@RaceProUK Or juiced slightly closer than Kenya.
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@boomzilla said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
This is so far beyond FWP territory.
Well if they marketed to just moderately rich idiots, they wouldn't have gotten
Google’s venture capital arm and other backers poured about $120 million into the startup
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@CarrieVS said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
I wouldn't pay $50 for a juicer
So you'd end up paying the $200 to have your three-day juice cleanse delivered once a month?
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@Yamikuronue In my house a "juice cleanse" is when one of my kids puts the glasses in the dishwasher.
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@RaceProUK said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
the cheaper stuff is actually reconstituted from concentrate to reduce long-distance transport cost
Which does nothing to reduce the flavour, so it's much better than paying over the odds for fresh
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@loopback0 said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
Kenya
I believe that is one of the options however in England our tastes have gone 'up market'. It seems most of the population prefer to drink juice of sweet fruits instead of regular turnip or beetroot juice that is common locally.
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@boomzilla said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
“Juicero’s mission is to make it dramatically easier and more enjoyable to consume more fresh, raw fruits and vegetables, and that’s a really tough nut to crack,” Dunn wrote. (A fantastic turn of phrase that hopefully was intentional, given Juicero's claim to deliver four tons of force during the pressing process.) “It seems simple, but despite everything we’ve done to-date as a food community, we’ve barely moved the needle.”
Uh...so what? This is so far beyond FWP territory. Who is actually willing to routinely spend $8 for a glass of juice in their own home that they have to make themselves? I have nothing against conspicuous consumption, per se, but this just makes them look kind of dumb.
Observation on the room service price. For whatever reason, when I worked in the London office of a NY-based financial infomation services provider that shall remain nameless, I occasionally had reason to visit the head office. The flights were over the four-hour threshold, so we got to fly business class (and Virgin business class is in fact somewhere between ordinary business class and ordinary first(1)), and we got to stay in (heavily discounted) rooms at the St Regis. Very posh place, and I sure am glad that the company provided Corporate Amex cards to even infrequent travellers.
Breakfast prices were a little scary, though - a not really very large cup of coffee was six dollars, in the restaurant.
(1) The air fare includes a chauffered car / limo between home and the airport and between the other airport and the hotel, both directions; a lounge full of free food and drink at both ends; zero-effort check-in when arriving at the airport; huge lie-flat seats, drinks on entering the plane, an in-flight massage on offer, and of course, the chance to play celeb and turn left when entering the plane.
And there was another trip for a different company, in '96 if memory serves, and one of my colleagues ended up having to explain to his boss why there was a $700 room service charge on his expenses. (11 of us from the same company were on that particular junket, and this guy had the most seniority, so he charged a group dinner to his room, and of course it showed up as room service.)
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@CarrieVS said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
I just eat the damn fruit.
That works also. Better than any other idea. Harder to monetize though. ;)
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@Polygeekery said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
Harder to monetize though.
Nonsense. I bet they make most of their profit off the fruit packs anyway. All I have to do is sell bags of fresh fruit, perhaps claiming that the exact combination of fruits and varieties is somehow nutritionally optimal. Organic, obviously.
I'll call it "raw juice." Juice is of course a processed food, with much of the nutrients removed and a high sugar content. It's unrecognisable from its raw ingredients, for goodness sake! You need to get your fruit juice direct from the fruit, untouched by any machine.
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@CarrieVS said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
@Polygeekery said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
Harder to monetize though.
Nonsense. I bet they make most of their profit off the fruit packs anyway. All I have to do is sell bags of fresh fruit, perhaps claiming that the exact combination of fruits and varieties is somehow nutritionally optimal. Organic, obviously.
I'll call it "raw juice." Juice is of course a processed food, with much of the nutrients removed and a high sugar content. It's unrecognisable from its raw ingredients, for goodness sake! You need to get your fruit juice direct from the fruit, untouched by any machine.
Get yourself to the valley. There are tons of investors ready to write you large checks.
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@Greybeard said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
I do remember another time being annoyed that all the TV channels were showing the same thing. Guy walking on Moon; what else can I watch?
I remember that too. But I wanted to watch it! (I was 7)
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@dkf said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
@Greybeard said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
There you have to go North to get to the Deep South.
Are you asserting that Florida is the Shallow South? (I could believe that…)
I thought it was the Transplanted North.
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@kt_ said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
@bb36e hey, they also check if the product hasn't been recalled. I'd pay $400 for that!
If they're that worried about recalls, I'd be worried.
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@boomzilla said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
Who is actually willing to routinely spend $8 for a glass of juice in their own home
Pretty sure I can go to a store and get it cheaper... Oh wait, this is CA so we actually have stores like that...
(Plus I can do it cheaper at home since I have one of those $20? juicers)
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@CarrieVS said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
All I have to do is sell bags of fresh fruit, perhaps claiming that the exact combination of fruits and varieties is somehow nutritionally optimal. Organic, obviously.
Already exists; our local "organic" supermarket sells frozen packets of pre-mixed, diced fruit/veggies that you just have to put into a blender after adding a bit of orange juice. Costs $4 - $5 for 3 portions (glasses).
Still cheaper than this overpriced shit.
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@asdf That's not what I was suggesting.
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@CarrieVS said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
@asdf That's not what I was suggesting.
Someone’s beaten you to it, I notice:
(Though it does make me wonder how they can offer 2 kg ℮ of something as heavy as oranges. Oh, wait, by making sure there’s at least 1.7 kg in the net — I thought there was also an upper limit, but it turns out there isn’t. Move along, there’s nothing to see here.)
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@asdf said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
pre-mixed, diced fruit/veggies that you just have to put into a blender after adding a bit of orange juice
I believe they call that a "smoothie", not "juice"
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@dcon said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
@boomzilla said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
Who is actually willing to routinely spend $8 for a glass of juice in their own home
Pretty sure I can go to a store and get it cheaper... Oh wait, this is CA so we actually have stores like that...
For $8 you could just get the glass of juice delivered home, freshly squeezed and ready to drink.
(I always wish we had pneumatic tube systems in cities, so you could buy a small thing on Amazon and have it pop in your apartment in 2 minutes)
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@anonymous234 said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
(I always wish we had pneumatic tube systems in cities, so you could buy a small thing on Amazon and have it pop in your apartment in 2 minutes)
You can get almost that if you order the right thing from the Super-Fast Chinese place. Except it's a guy who drives like a maniac who brings it round…
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@asdf said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
Fucking hell, has this idiot never lived outside a city center full of rich idiots? In the small town I'm from, there are still farmers who do weekly deliveries. They even call ahead to ask you what you want this week.
You're the one surrounded by rich kids. Around here small farmers have a very low margin and can't go visiting people like that if they want to survive. Gas and time cost money, and vegetables are ridiculously cheap.
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@wharrgarbl said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
Around here small farmers have a very low margin and can't go visiting people like that if they want to survive.
If the small farmers here wouldn't provide that service, people would go to the supermarket instead and they'd actually earn less, because they'd have to sell to the big distributors. This service is the only chance they have at surviving unless they want to grow monocultures on a very large scale.
Also, their margin is probably bigger if they sell directly, because neither a distributor nor a supermarket get their share.
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@asdf Maybe farmers here are just doing it wrong, dunno why I'm not aware of anything like this in the small cities around here.
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@CarrieVS said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
you can presumably just throw out the bag,
Not everywhere.
https://www.juicero.com/sustainability/
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@asdf Few hours later a random door to door salesman was offering fruits here. How I never noticed that? Wouldn't buy food of some stranger anyway.
Obviously @asdf sent him here to win this argument.
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Juicero said in Does the juice contain caffeine?:
None of our juices contain caffeine.
Well, that's the real problem with this product. Fuck that!
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@wharrgarbl said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
@asdf Few hours later a random door to door salesman was offering fruits here.
We used to have that. Only they would just park the truck and walk around yelling "Potatoes, onions, cabbages" off the top of their lungs.
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@wharrgarbl said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
@asdf Few hours later a random door to door salesman was offering fruits here. How I never noticed that? Wouldn't buy food of some stranger anyway.
Never seen that... Selling meat on the other hand...
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@dcon said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
@wharrgarbl said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
@asdf Few hours later a random door to door salesman was offering fruits here. How I never noticed that? Wouldn't buy food of some stranger anyway.
Never seen that... Selling meat on the other hand...
I recently saw someone selling meat and seafood from the bed of a derelict pickup truck in a parking lot in the shady part of town.
Because nothing says quality and "I won't get horrible food poisoning" like purchasing meat and seafood from a rusty pickup.
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I am in love with this story. It's like someone took the bullshit byproducts of VC funding, crowdfunding, DRM and IoT and just squeezed them into a nutritious puree with enough Vitamin Schadenfreude to sustain me for days, maybe weeks.
~ quoted
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@homoBalkanus said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
We used to have that. Only they would just park the truck and walk around yelling "Potatoes, onions, cabbages" off the top of their lungs.
Not yelling over the sound of their horn blaring at 7AM Saturday morning?
Pah. Amateurs.
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Juicero breakdown
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I would venture to say a majority of the bill of materials is devoted to machined parts, which is highly unusual for a mass-market consumer product.
Which the Juicero isn't.
Our usual advice to hardware founders is to focus on getting a product to market to test the core assumptions on actual target customers, and then iterate. Instead, Juicero spent $120M over two years to build a complex supply chain and perfectly engineered product that is too expensive for their target demographic.
WaterJuicefall model!
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@cartman82 Whoa whoa whoa.
That guy is actually called Einstein?
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@anonymous234 It is an actual name...
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@masonwheeler German for One Cup
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@anonymous234 Not as if it’s a unique name nobody has ever had before.
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@Jaloopa said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
@masonwheeler German for One Cup
Where's Zweimädchen then?
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@cartman82 Just as I suspected: they used hobbyist mindset and applied it to a mass-produced model. (Why does it have a friggan ARM chip?!)
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@Yamikuronue said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
Why does it have a friggan ARM chip?!
It's an IoT device.
It's obviously so any potential malware runs smoothly after someone inevitably finds a way to hack into the thing.
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@Yamikuronue In a world where dildos have webcams, nothing is surprising anymore
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@Yamikuronue Well, of course it has a chip, so that your $399 investment is useless if you discontinue your fruit bag subscription. As someone else already said, it can prevent the "problem" of coffee machines, which are not intelligent and can be used with cheaper third-party coffee pads/cups. That's everything except hobbyism.
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@Yamikuronue said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
(Why does it have a friggan ARM chip?!)
Switching to a Z80-derivative is only going to save a few cents; they could cut the cost more by using less milling on the internal parts…
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@dkf said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
Switching to a Z80-derivative is only going to save a few cents; they could cut the cost more by using less milling on the internal parts…
For a device that does not need any chip at all, or even electricity.
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@Adynathos Makes you earn your juice!
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@Grunnen said in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:
As someone else already said, it can prevent the "problem" of coffee machines, which are not intelligent and can be used with
cheaper third-partycounterfeit coffee pads/cups.There, enterprised it for you!
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@boomzilla The juicero bag was photoshopped into that picture.
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@Rhywden Yes. Visual jokes are often like that.