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.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
I like flavored coffee on occasion. We have two grinders, the slightly lower quality one gets all the flavored beans, they never go into the good grinder.
That said, I got a handful of flavors recently to share with friends. I like to bring our espresso machine glamping, I set it up on a table under a tarp next to our tent, with a 100 foot cord running to a small generator.
When I got home, I tried mixing a little bit of each flavor together. 5 flavors,a few beans from each. It was honestly terrible. Far worse than any individual flavor by itself. It wasn’t unique or interesting, it was bad, and I’ll never do it again 🤷♂️
Edit: That said, while I would never put flavored beans in the flavor free grinder, as a matter of principle… I’ve never noticed a problem when changing from one flavor to another in the flavored grinder. So I doubt the grocery store grinder would affect the flavor that much 🤷♂️