Dying for a Good Coffee?

An Australian funeral home has raised a few eyebrows – and coffee cups – with a rather unusual advertising promotion. Every person who buys one of their prepaid funeral plans is entered into a drawing for a $2,500 Jura Impressa J5 espresso and coffee machine. The owners of Gregory and Carr Funeral Homes say that they thought of the promotion themselves and the employees of the funeral home all chipped in to buy the machine as a prize.

One expert on competitions said that he just didn’t get it. “I’m not sure what they want to achieve,” he told the Sydney Herald Sun.

The answer to that seems fairly obvious – they’re trying to score a leg up on the competition who are all out their trying to sell their own pre-paid, fixed-price funeral plans. Why a coffee maker?

The general manager of the funeral home put it quite succinctly. It’s because coffee is such a large part of the process of forming a funeral plan. Folks come in to talk about their funeral arrangements over a cup or two of coffee. In addition, he said, coffee brings people together, particularly in times of grief.

Everyone who comes in to buy a pre-paid funeral plan seems to like the idea, says Graham Steward, the aforementioned general manager. Everyone who has bought a pre-paid plan from the funeral home has asked to be entered into the drawing for the high-end coffee machine.

The Jura Impressa J5 is one of the highest end automatic coffee centers for the home market. It features six settings for coffee at the touch of a button – one espresso shot, two espresso shots, one coffe, two coffees, hot water for tea or other hot beverages, and steam for frothing milk. Each button can be individually programmed to dispese exactly the amount of water desired at the temperature desired.The Impressa J5 also includes an integrated commercial grade conical burr grinder to grind your coffee beans fresh just before brewing.

The lovely coffee machine literally does it all for you – dispenses the coffee beans, grinds them to your liking, heats the water to the perfect temperature, dispenses just the right amount of water, turns the pump on and off at the right time, froths the milk – pulling it from a cold milk pitcher – and even dumps the coffee grounds for you. If you’re going to get a cup of coffee to die for, this is the machine that will make it for sure.