Weekly Coffee Subscription Pricing

We wanted to say a quick word about a recent price change to our weekly subscription offering. 

Our long time subscribers will no doubt notice that the weekly subscription price has increased substantially.  There is a very good reason for that and we wanted to share it with our loyal customers.

Recently, there had been some confusion about how many bags were included at each subscription level.  When we set up the subscription duration, we presumed four weeks in a month, so a 3 month subscription would be 12 bags, a six month, 24 bags etc.  Unfortunately, 3 months can be either 12 or 13 weeks depending on which three months you count and six months is actually 26, so it created some confusion.  We wanted to clarify this in the description going forward.

While we were there, we noticed that the prices for the weekly option seemed off when compared to the prices for the bi-weekly and monthly ones.  For example, a monthly subscription for 12 months (12 bags) cost $212 while a weekly subscription for six months (24 bags) was just $240.  Something was definitely very wrong.

We have corrected this problem, but unfortunately from the customer's point of view, it's going to look like we just instituted a massive price increase.  

Let me give you a quick explanation on how subscription pricing is set.  Consider that the average price of a bag of coffee on our website is about $17.  Now, when you add the shipping to it, if you purchase one bag a week, you will pay $23 on average.  If you sign up for a subscription, you should get a discount off of the one time price, so depending on how long a subscription interval you choose, your per bag charge (inclusive of shipping) is $17 - $20.  This works out to a discount of 13%-27%.

Under the weekly price that was on the web site before, once you factored in our cost to ship, we were selling our coffee for only $5-$6 per bag, which in some cases was actually below our cost to produce it.  You can probably see how this was not a sustainable business practice.

I know that it may seem like a capricious price increase, but I hope that once you understand the economics behind it, you'll see why we had to fix this problem.  Obviously, we will honor all subscriptions at the original price through their expiration, but new subscription purchases will be at the current corrected prices.

Thank You For Understanding.