They kept turning up in my feed. Simply Good Coffee. Plastic-free brewing.

And I ignored them, the way you ignore anything that shows up in your feed claiming to be exactly what you were just thinking about.

I'll tell you exactly what held me up, because I think it holds up a lot of people:

I had never heard of them. Four hundred dollars is real money, and I had no idea who these people were. My old machine came from a company my mother had heard of. That counts for something when you're deciding.

I had just bought a coffee maker. Not the ten-year-old one — I'd replaced it that spring with something newer that I actually liked. Buying another one felt absurd.

And I'd been disappointed before. Everything online is the best thing ever made. I've bought the best thing ever made several times.

So I sat on it. Not for a week. For months. I read the reviews. I read the ones that weren't five stars, which is what I always do. I looked up whether anyone independent had actually tested the thing.

Then one morning I was standing there looking at that lid again, and I thought: I have now spent four months thinking about this. That's not caution anymore. That's just stalling.

I ordered it.