Every tech boom has its excesses and it’s hard to go past the Juicero as the most egregious of today’s mania.
A number of high profile investors, including Google’s venture capital arm, have poured $120 million dollars into the internet connected device that squeezes juice from pre-prepared pouches of pulped fruit and vegetables.
Bloomberg found the devices don’t a great deal as the juice can be squeezed out of the packs by hand, which is just as well given the microchipped pulp containers can be disabled by the manufacturer.
While the Juicero aims to be the juicer equivalent of the Keurig coffee capsule, the device’s expense, built in obsolescence and unnecessary waste is emblematic of everything that’s wrong with the current Silicon Valley culture.
The fundamental question of any business idea is ‘what problem does this solve?’ It’s hard to think of anything the Juicero fixes.