I went to look for a #dosing cup this morning, hoping to reduce mess when grinding #coffee for #espresso. And I found myself struck by an interesting detail.
When you look at product listings for dosing cups, they fall into two main groups. Group A is mostly-name-brand dosing cups priced in roughly the $25-$35 range, in either deep-drawn stainless steel or cast aluminum, with product photos showing how one would of course use a dosing cup.
It's the other group that's interesting, in a head-scratchy way. These are mostly taper-drawn stainless steel cups from dozens of no-name brands clearly reselling the same three or four cups, for roughly $8-$15, and what is interesting about them is their product photos. Because the product photos on this tier's listings make it clear that while the vendor clearly understands that a dosing cup has something to do with coffee, they have only the vaguest idea what it's actually for. So you have photos showing someone transferring whole coffee beans, for no apparent reason, into a dosing cup with a spoon, without a scale in sight. Or... someone pouring ground coffee from the dosing cup directly into a coffee cup. And then there's the photos where I can't quite figure out what they're trying to accomplish.
It's really kind of bizarre.