Juicero and the Misplaced Anger of an Intuitive Internet Mob

There was a story that took my Twitter feed by storm last week, and it was the tale of a tech company squeezed to death by its own hubris.

Juicero is ‘Keurig but for juice’, with their base product being a $400 machine that uses proprietary packets of diced vegetables and fruits to give you your fresh-squeezed-cold-press-juice fix on the reg.

The device is connected to the internet (because of course it is), and includes strange ‘features’ like the ability for the Juicero machine to scan a QR code on the back of their packets and reject one if its expired or perhaps recalled.

I remember reading about the Juicero when it was first announced a couple of years ago, and I thought it was pretty dumb. I still think it’s pretty dumb — juice has proven to be pretty subpar for your health, and even if it was good for you there’s little to be said about the value of this juicing machine over others which don’t, say, include proprietary technology which locks you in to a system.

So it was no surprise that the internet went wild when a news outlet features a story on the fact that the Juicero packets can be squeezed by hand, bypassing the expensive machine entirely. For a product that went above and beyond to espouse the incredible force their machine could exert on those pulped veggies, this can seem pretty infuriating.

Yet instead of finding myself laughing along with the rest of the crowd, I found myself disappointed in the mob mentality.

There’s a few reasons for that.

For one, there’s a bit of misplaced anger towards the company, instead of the product. So many of the people in the crowd have seemed to assume that this is some dirty secret the Juicero people have been hiding all along, and that no one in their right mind would ever buy their product now that they know they could get the same results by hand. Yet it takes two minutes for someone to squeeze the packet by hand, an amount of time that no one in their right mind — especially someone interested in purchasing a $400 juicing machine — would ever commit to.

Another reason is a bit of misinformation that’s brought into the equation. Some people began to claim that the packets were nothing more than expensive, adult Capri Suns, full of juice and ready to stick a straw in. Yet again, that’s not true — it’s simply full of freshly diced vegetables and fruits. Which makes sense, for a pre-prepared packet of soon-to-be-juice.

Which at the end leads me to the reason why I felt so disappointed. The reason that Juicero is bad isn’t that the machine isn’t necessary, it’s that the entire idea is problematic.

I take issue with the misplaced anger I’ve been seeing because any time we get angry at something without fully considering what we’re getting angry at, we lose a bit of our rational mind. It is difficult to convince someone that our perspective is worth listening to, when the opposite party can find flaws which allow them to write everything we saw off completely.

This is what happened in the case of Juicero. I’m sure that the company’s C-level staff read the article, saw the subsequent tweets, and felt incredibly misunderstood and outraged by the online conversation. It’s why the CEO took to Medium to tell people that critics simply don’t understand the value proposition of the Juicero machine. They’ve got the company all wrong, he says!

Except they haven’t.

This is the frustrating thing: The mob is right, but their reasoning us incorrect.

I believe the crowd is intuiting a problem, and latching on to a story to validate their feelings.

That is so, so dangerous.

It’s dangerous because this sort of anger will never change minds. It will simply exacerbate a rift between two sides, making things worse instead of making things better.

I believe that Juicero will fail, not because people can squeeze juice out of packets with their own hands (no one is actually going to do this) but because it’s a bad product. Yet, when the company does a post-mortem, they will attribute their closure (or acquisition) to a media outlet that turned against them and a market that wasn’t ready.

New companies will be formed by the team, and new products will be made which learned nothing from the actual failures of the past product.

And the cycle will begin again.