You may know about those Nespresso coffee machines for which you need special capsules to get your coffee. A small pack costs a few bucks, and more than half a kilo of ground coffee would cost you. When I first learned about those machines, I thought that the concept was utterly ridiculous. Why would someone get such a machine, which will lead to staggering costs in the long run when you could instead get high-quality beans for the same price? I quickly forgot about it, but as it so happened, two women refreshed my memory, technically three.

When I was still living with my now ex-wife, she once brought home a brand-new Nespresso machine. Her mother thought it was great buy and of course she got all excited and immediately bought two, one for herself and one for my ex-wife. Well, she was not too pleased when I made a quick calculation, showing what an utterly ridiculous purchase this was. I made her look up the price of 500g of espresso beans as well as regular coffee beans and then I asked her how much a pack of her coffee pods costs. She was not pleased about that. In the long run, even an expensive coffee maker would have paid for itself. It was as if the concept of total cost of ownership was completely foreign to her. Oh, and what about all the waste she’ll produce by going through a stack of “coffee pods”? Wasn’t she a self-professed environmentalist? Well, that led to an argument, which ended up becoming reason #742 to divorce her. I added a bit of fuel to her fire by asking her why she lets her mother ruin her personal finances, which triggered her nicely.

In the end, her Nespresso machine still got plenty of use, even though that woman could not even make ends meet back then. With those coffee pods, she could make ends meet even less.

The other example was given by my current girlfriend. She interned in a company in female-dominated industry. I was very amused when I learned that they have a Nespresso machine in the office. If they had a man doing their books instead of an aged cat lady, they would have figured out that they could get a prime coffee maker and would save money in the end — and would get better coffee, too. Well, I can’t say I was pleased when my girlfriend mused about buying a Nespresso machine herself, but, unlike my ex-wife, she does listen to reason. I got a bit of hamstering when she claimed that “it would be cheap compared to getting coffee at Starbucks”, but that kind of reflexive female pseudo-reasoning quickly subsided when she realized that a Nespresso machine is an absurd purchase.

I think that an item such as a Nespresso machine is a perfect example of the economic incompetence of women. Sure, not all women can’t handle money, just as not all men can handle money. However, it seems that whenever there is an item with poor total cost of ownership or something with a poor to non-existent resale value such as fashionable clothing, it targets women instead of men.

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