Juicero maker squeezed out of business after months of ridicule
Pour one out for Juicero.
The company behind the infamously useless $400 machine that empties fruit pulp out of bags has officially run out of juice.
The once-hyped startup became a poster child for Silicon Valley's most ridiculous excesses when Bloomberg discovered earlier this year that it could be disrupted by the human hand. The reporters found that simply applying pressure to the bags yielded juice about as efficiently as the shiny wifi enabled appliance.
Juicero's been feeling the squeeze since then. First, it was forced to hand out refunds to all the customers who felt ripped off by the revelation. Months later, it underwent a "strategic shift" in which it laid off a quarter of its workforce and tried to find ways to lower its $400 price tag.
Meanwhile, the company had become an object of ridicule in the tech world, a self-parody of everything wrong with its hype-machine culture.
As far as Silicon Valley satire goes, the story was almost too on-the-nose. For instance, Juicero CEO and founder Doug Evans once said he wanted to be the Steve Jobs of juicing. And when Bloomberg first confronted the company with its findings, one of Juicero's defenses was that the machine could still read the QR code printed on the packets and tell you their expiration date.
In a fitting end, Evans was apparently busy getting weird in the desert at Burning Man as news of Juicero's demise was breaking on Friday.
It did have some fans:
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The company said in its final announcement on Friday that it will continue handing out refunds to anyone who was, for whatever reason, still holding out hope for the Juicero.
Sometimes even the smartest technology is no match for the power of the human hand.
Patrick Kulp is a Business Reporter at Mashable. Patrick covers digital advertising, online retail and the future of work. A graduate of UC Santa Barbara with a degree in political science and economics, he previously worked at the Pacific Coast Business Times.
