Inconveniently disposable

I just spent a week working at a conference and trade show put on by my company in San Francisco. The week included lots of paper cups and plastic cutlery. In airports, on airplanes, in hotels, in convention centers—everything is used once and tossed. Most people seem not to notice it. If you go to enough of these things, it just becomes routine.

I was thinking about it when I first arrived in my hotel room, though. I decided I wanted a cup of coffee. All Marriott hotel rooms now have one of those coffee makers that brews one cup at a time using a pre-filled coffee sachet in a disposable plastic tray. Each tray-n-sachet is individually wrapped in plastic. So I tore open a packet, placed it in the machine, and placed a paper cup (also individually wrapped in plastic) under the drip spout. 

Next to the coffee machine are a few more plastic packets labeled “Coffee Valet” in neat curlicue script. Inside each one is a packet of sugar, a packet of artificial sweetener, a packet of non-dairy creamer, and a plastic stirring straw. I only wanted the sugar and the stirring straw, so I left the other contents in the basket next to the machine, hoping they might be picked up by the maid and sent back to the factory to be resealed in a new Coffee Valet, but knowing they’d most likely be tossed.

Since the coffee isn’t that great, I decided I actually needed two packets of sugar. This required tearing open another Coffee Valet and leaving the non-sugar contents sitting sadly in the basket. At this point I was thoroughly shocked at the waste incurred in making a simple cup of coffee. I had a pile of plastic sitting next to me as I sipped from a paper cup that would be added to the pile momentarily. This was my third stay in a Marriott in the past nine months, though, so it wasn’t exactly a new shock. It’s a recurring shock I get every time I travel for work (Although the Coffee Valet is a recent development. They used to have sugar and creamer packets loose in the basket.). 

But I did notice something new this time around. What I noticed is that all this individually wrapped, disposable, single-serving nonsense—besides begin wasteful—isn’t even more convenient. I had to open up six (six!) different plastic or paper packets to make my one cup of joe. I had to sort through what I wanted and didn’t want, and I had to gather up all the spent packets to throw in the trash. Imagine if they had just had a regular coffee machine, regular mugs, and the coffee and accoutrements in jars with scoops. It probably would have taken less time to get my coffee going. There would have been a little cleanup afterward, but how long does that take?

What Marriott is really going for here is not convenience so much as it is the clinical sterility of their facilities. I suppose this is what Americans want. If we had unsealed jars of coffee in our hotel rooms, there would be no telling how the previous guest might have tampered with it. Maybe he rubbed it all over his naked body and then swept it up off the bathroom floor and put it back in the jar. Maybe he ejaculated in it or laced it with strychnine. 

These suspicions may not be totally unfounded, but what does that say about us as a culture and about how we view each other? I remember having coffee at a small guesthouse in Bogor, Indonesia. They had a common area with a hot water thermos, ground coffee in a tub, sugar in a dish, and honest-to-god porcelain mugs. I had plenty of opportunity to do something disgusting like replace the coffee with dehydrated, ground-up deer poop, but I didn’t, and no one seemed to suspect that I would. We all just drank the coffee, and no one got sick. 

I guess a giant chain like Marriott has the money to insulate itself from even the remote chance that someone might get hurt from drinking tampered-with coffee. So why risk it? But there’s still one thing I have to ask about: the Coffee Valet. What the hell is that extra packet for? It makes no sense, Marriott. It makes no fucking sense.