Last month, a hundred-dollar coffee machine sold out in eighteen hours.
Here’s the part that should make no sense: it only brews one brand. The Lavazza Tablì machine accepts exactly one thing — Lavazza’s new Tablì tab, a pod made of pure compressed coffee. No plastic, no wrapper, no coating. You brew it, then you toss it in the compost. Nothing else fits the machine. There is no knockoff pod coming. The lock-in is total.
And people lined up for it. The presale bundle sold out in eighteen hours. Lavazza dropped a second round a week later.
Now rewind to 2014. Keurig tried this exact move — by force. The Keurig 2.0 scanned every pod you inserted and rejected anything Keurig didn’t sell. Customers revolted. Within weeks, workarounds were circulating online — people were literally taping old pod lids into their machines to defeat the scanner. Competitors shipped clip-on devices to unlock it. Sales sagged. It became a business-school case study in how to make your own customers hate you. Even the K-Cup’s inventor has said publicly that he regrets creating it.
