Housing in the US has become so unaffordable that a coffee company has based a viral marketing campaign on the idea that almost nobody can afford to buy a house.
Maxwell House coffee, a 133-year-old brand, recently launched a marketing campaign rebranding themselves as “Maxwell Apartment Coffee”.
“Maxwell House? In this economy?” a narrator asks in a video ad, promising that Maxwell Apartment is “the same affordable coffee you love, now with an even more affordable name”.
The company is also offering a year’s supply of its coffee for “under $40” on Amazon, though supplies of this “12-month lease” of pre-ground coffee are apparently limited.
Last year, the median age of first-time homebuyers in the US hit an all-time high of 38, according to statistics from the National Association of Realtors (NAR). In 1981, when the association first began tracking homebuyer characteristics, the median age of a first-time homebuyer was 29.
The proportion of homes being sold to first-time buyers also hit a record low last year, with those buyers only making up 24% of the market, compared with 44% in 1981, according to NAR.
“First-time buyers face high home prices, high mortgage interest rates and limited inventory, making them a decade older with significantly higher incomes than previous generations of buyers,” Jessica Lautz, NAR deputy chief economist and vice-president of research, said in a statement about the data last year.
Fewer than 16% of homes for sale in the US in 2023 were affordable for the typical household – the lowest share on record, according to statistics from Redfin, a digital real estate brokerage. While housing affordability increased slightly in 2024, the improvement was marginal, according to the company’s data.
First introduced in 1892, Maxwell House coffee has seen several notable marketing efforts over its 133 years, from a pricey early campaign to expand the brand from the south to New York City, to midcentury television ads that touted that it “tastes as good as it smells” and 1970s ads with its most famous slogan, “Good to the last drop”.
In the 1930s, the company introduced a free “Maxwell House Haggadah”, a printed guide for the seder dinner on the the Jewish holiday of Passover. The Maxwell Haggadah tradition continued for decades, reportedly making the brand “the coffee of choice for Jewish households around New York City”, and even showing up at Barack Obama’s first White House Passover dinner in 2009, art historian Kerri Steinberg wrote in 2022.
The new “Maxwell Apartment” advertising campaign is a “tongue-in-cheek” effort designed by by Rethink, a New York-based advertising agency, with the goal of helping the brand “strengthen its connection among coffee-loving renters – a growing population across the country”, according to Little Black Book, a marketing industry publication.
While Maxwell’s bargain “yearlong lease” of tinned coffee was not available at publication time, the coffee company said in a statement that its “year-long supply of coffee will come with an official Maxwell Apartment ‘lease’ to sign”.
