Science Juicero, maker of the doomed $400 internet-connected juicer, is shutting down

https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/1/16243356/juicero-shut-down-lay-off-refund

Juicero, the company that made its name by creating a proprietary juice-squeezing machine, is shutting down. The announcement comes from Juicero's website. In its post, the company writes that it is suspending the sale of both its juice packets and its Juicero Press device. The last juice packet delivery will occur next week. All customers have up to 90 days to request a refund for their purchase of the Juicero Press, regardless of when they bought it. Fortune reports that employees are being given 60 days notice.

So it's time to say goodbye to Juicero, although we only knew its product for 16 months. The founder of Organic Avenue (a now-bankrupt restaurant chain), Doug Evans, introduced the device in March 2016. At the time, we scoffed at the fact that it cost $699 and required proprietary juice packs. Then in April 2017, Bloomberg published a piece that likely doomed the company to fail. Reporters found that the company's packs of fruits and vegetables didn't require the actual Juicero machine, but were instead squeezeable by hand. Basically, the pricey machine was completely useless, which wasn't a great look for the company.

After that PR catastrophe, Juicero said it hoped to eventually cut the cost of its machine to around $200. It also laid off 25 percent of its staff and offered full refunds, but that appears to not have been sufficient to keep the business afloat. Juicero fell fast. I just hope the bodegas can get a refund.
 
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Echo_Ender said:
An engineer friend of mine watched that deconstruction video and says he's 100% certain they're allowing returns is just to get the machines back so they can scrap out all the expensive parts.

He said the stuff in there is so high-end that if they sell it off, they can probably turn a major financial loss into a fairly minor one.
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If they were selling it at a loss in the first place, there's probably good shit in those things. Too bad it was put to such a useless use.
 
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melty said:
I like the idea of being able to put your own chopped up fruit in a bag and use it that way as well.
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At least a hundred bucks or so of what you were paying for this piece of shit was to have DRM bullshit that made sure you couldn't do that, though. It would only squeeze juice from a bag with their shitty DRM shit on it. While squeezing money out of your wallet.

Often credited to P.T. Barnum, H.L. Mencken once said the following: "No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby."

As delightfully cynical as it is, this appears to be the case where someone actually did go broke that way, and not even by underestimating the intelligence of the American people at large, but by the vastly dumber and richer ranks of hipster dumbasses.

Trump proves the latter part of Mencken's Conjecture, though. At least for a couple more years.
 
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Sinners Sandwich said:
Next: Smartpoop - toilet paper with wifi, bluetooth, music, different colored lights and a connection to Amazon Alexa. To use it you need to make a smartpoop account, type in the password, then press a button on each tissue you want to use and wait 30 minutes.
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Pair that with a wifi-connected toilet that weighs your turds when you drop them and chemically analyzes your urine. Then it spams your phone with Web MD articles and advertisements for high-fibre foods. Oh, and if it detects that you've been ingesting naughty substances it notifies the popo.
 
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melty said:
It's the Internet of Things trend, it's a huge trend and buzzword. My friend works in product design and at his last company, he'd get a ton of people coming to them asking for quotes on their shitty IoT products. It's like people who don't have any really innovative ideas so hey lets just hook the internet up to your toaster! everyone will want it! If every 5th household buys it that's like sixty billion dollars revenue!
I sarcastically suggested something like a q-tip holder that sends you a text when it's low on q-tips and he said that's better than most of the ideas they were getting pitched.
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I hope they work on this next:
 
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This is literally King Camp Gillette's Razor and Blades model taken to the 21st century extreme, and implemented by idiots that don't understand how Loss-Leaders work. If this was to work, rather than buying a pack after pack of double edged razor blades, you're buying overpriced bags of masticated fruit and vegetable pulp, but the juicer itself would be sold at a huge loss, so that the convenience of buying the Juice bags would actually be attractive to the consumer and make up for the loss in the end. The real problem is that the company didn't have an engineering staff capable of "Muntzing" the juicer down to a price point that would make people actually buy it for the sake of convenience and not be a massive loss for the company to subsidize it. $400 for a specialized gadget locked to it's own overpriced proprietary consumable product made it noncompetitive from the start. If the juicer had retailed for close to or somewhere under $100, it might have worked out, because this is America and we love overpriced "convenience" shit Like Keurig coffee makers and Kraft Easy-Mac.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_and_blades_model
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_Muntz
 
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FromaCorvairSix said:
This is literally King Camp Gillette's Razor and Blades model taken to the 21st century extreme, and implemented by idiots that don't understand how Loss-Leaders work. If this was to work, rather than buying a pack after pack of double edged razor blades, you're buying overpriced bags of masticated fruit and vegetable pulp, but the juicer itself would be sold at a huge loss, so that the convenience of buying the Juice bags would actually be attractive to the consumer and make up for the loss in the end. The real problem is that the company didn't have an engineering staff capable of "Muntzing" the juicer down to a price point that would make people actually buy it for the sake of convenience and not be a massive loss for the company to subsidize it. $400 for a specialized gadget locked to it's own overpriced proprietary consumable product made it noncompetitive from the start. If the juicer had retailed for close to or somewhere under $100, it might have worked out, because this is America and we love overpriced "convenience" shit Like Keurig coffee makers and Kraft Easy-Mac.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_and_blades_model
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_Muntz
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Muntz certainly was a genius in that respect, but I guess some companies don't go for the "As Seen on TV" aspect that made these devices work.
 
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melty said:
I like the idea of being able to put your own chopped up fruit in a bag and use it that way as well. Don't people who make juice like making their own blends anyway? Even keurig sells a reusable cup you can put your own coffee in.
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It's funny you mention this, since Juicero apparently sued another juice machine maker with that concept, claiming that the juicer infringes on a patent that Juicero was granted.
 
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Ubiquitous said:
Pair that with a wifi-connected toilet that weighs your turds when you drop them and chemically analyzes your urine. Then it spams your phone with Web MD articles and advertisements for high-fibre foods. Oh, and if it detects that you've been ingesting naughty substances it notifies the popo.
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Adult Swim already thought of the possibilities.
 
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