Gevalia Coffee (or Gevalia Kaffe) will send you coffee by mail. You sign up by giving them your name, address, and credit card info, and they take care of the rest.

I signed up for a trial offer a few months ago, drawn in by their promise of a free coffee maker. I received the coffee maker and my initial shipment of coffee at a low introductory price, and while the coffee wasn’t great, it wasn’t bad either. I decided to keep the membership for at least one more shipment, so I could try other varieties of Gevalia coffee.

The first thing I noticed when selecting coffee varieties for my next shipment was that Gevalia seems to go out of their way to not mention the size of the package you’ll be receiving. The website and printed materials both talk in terms of “boxes” and “quantity,” but never mention “ounces” or “pounds.” Here’s an example:

This is very tricky of Gevalia for a couple of reasons. Most obviously, they don’t ever specify the amount of coffee you’ll be receiving for the listed price. Is it 4 oz? 8 oz? 12 oz? 16 oz? You don’t know until you receive your order. I had initially assumed that it was 16 oz, or 1 lb, of coffee, largely because a lot of their marketing material claimed that they were less expensive than everyone else. Since I know I can pay $10.99 for 1 lb of quality coffee at my local community coffee shop, I assumed that I would be getting 1 lb packages for my $8 per “box.”

Nope. And this is the where the second tricky part comes in – Gevalia Coffee comes in 8 oz boxes, not 16 oz 1-lb packages, or the much more common 12 oz packages that you’ll find at local coffee shops & stores. This makes comparing prices a little less straightforward, and I think it confuses a lot of people into thinking they’re getting a good deal.

Example: You can buy 12 oz of quality Starbucks brand coffee from Target for $7. Gevalia will sell you 8 oz of coffee for about the same price, plus shipping. But you’re getting just 8 oz (or 66% of 12 oz) for the same price. To put it another way, you’d get 50% more coffee if you bought your coffee at Target, and you wouldn’t have to pay shipping. Or, think of it like this: If Gevalia was selling the same 12-oz size, they’d charge you $10.50 for it, then charge you more for shipping.

I received my first regular shipment of Gevalia coffee the other day. 4 boxes for a total of 2 lbs. Total cost to me, shipping included: $35.00. Wow, that’s $17.50 per pound of coffee! And I didn’t even order anything exotic – just your standard, everyday blends. I don’t know about you, but I think that that’s pretty high. Even the high-quality locally-roasted 100% organic Dunn Brothers beans cost less than $17.50 per lb. It’d be one thing if this Gevalia coffee was super high quality, but it’s not. It’s a little better than Folgers, but not as good as Starbucks or Caribou. In other words, it’s low to low-mid quality.

If you search the internet, you’ll find a lot of accounts of people having trouble cancelling Gevalia, or with Gevalia sending them special shipments that they didn’t request. I haven’t had any problems like that, but I’m not going to give them the chance – I called to cancel as soon as I saw the price I was paying for just 2 lbs of coffee. After trying to trick me into reducing the frequency of the shipments as a way to “help me afford Gevalia,” the nice lady in India assured me my account had been cancelled. We’ll see.