Dashing our collective dreams of a future in which bags of juice could be transformed into slightly more drinkable cups of juice, using nothing more than a $400 wi-fi enabled “juice press,” public laughingstock Juicero has announced that it’s functionally going out of business. It’s a sad day for us all, not because the “high-tech” device was very good at making juice—it wasn’t—but because it’s always nice to have something out there in the world to look at and know we’re doing better than.
The company issued a press release today, announcing that it was discontinuing its subscription service—i.e., the only way to get the bar-coded bags of produce that were the only things Juicero would juice—due to the high costs of fruit. (And definitely not because it’s spent the last several months getting dunked on by people squeezing juice out of the bags by hand.) At least the company is offering full refunds for the Juicero’s $400 price tag, eliminating at least one data point in the brewing divorces between early adopters and their weary spouses that are presumably developing all over the country, as the “internet of things (that kind of suck)” mindset takes hold.