Some comments:
The pods are relatively common. As others have mentioned, you can get them at Target and some grocery stores. Online, you can get them from Better Coffee, Coffeewiz, and many others. And, of course, you can make your own.
There are three common pod systems:
- The pod system, as used by this coffee maker. Popularized by Senseo. Cheapest pods, but they're harder to work with when you're done, and they go bad quickly if you don't keep them in a tightly sealed container.
- The Keurig system uses sealed containers (K cups) that cost more, but they're less mess and they stay fresh longer.
- The Tassimo system users sealed containers (T disks) that cost even more than K cups, but in addition to the K cup advantages, they include a barcode that tells the coffee maker the right temp and quantity of water to use. Supposedly, the most Dr. Clayton Forrester-proof.
My wife and I use the K cups at home. They're great on workdays -- we each get our own flavor of coffee in the morning with no flavor mixing and almost no mess or cleanup. On the weekends, when I sit around and drink too much coffee, they can get expensive fast.
We went with the K cups because I've used the pods before. I like to clean out the machine as soon as it's done, and like a regular filter machine, the pods are a lump of hot, wet grounds. You end up either burning yourself or dripping coffee on the floor. If you're a normal more patient person and can wait until the coffee grounds cool, the pods are a great way to go.
Any of the single-cup coffee systems would be pretty good for the workplace, too. Less worrying about who cleans the coffee machine, and charging by the pod seems more fair somehow than charging by the cup.
Edit: Also, for most of these systems, you probably need to use the smaller cup size. Since the amount of coffee in the pods doesn't change, if you want a strong cup of coffee, you need to use less water. Most of the "this coffee is too weak" comments come from people who don't understand this.
