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 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.