Who wants to spend $400 on a juicer? How about laughing at a $400 juicer?

The last couple of weeks, two different items circulating on the internet about bagged beverages have caught my attention: one for its long-term success and another for its lightweight reception.

Both involve flexible packaging for consumer staples.

First to Canada, where some regions have been using bags for their milk since the 1970s.

In late March, the pop culture website The AV Club took a question from a reader wondering why Canadians use bags for their milk rather than the high density polyethylene jugs that we Americans are far more accustomed to using.

As writer Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya noted, 75 to 80 percent of Ontario milk consumption comes in bags. The bags were first introduced by DuPont Co. in the late 1960s, but they really took off in Canada in 1970 for one reason, namely that Canada had gone metric.

"Jug and carton manufacturers — along with most of Canada's manufacturing industries — faced challenges in converting to the new system. By comparison, plastic bags were easy to modify, and the country's quick adoption of the metric system helped spur bagged milk's popularity, and it soon became the market leader," Upadhyaya wrote.

So the bags became the economical, convenient choice for dairies and consumers. The use of bags also created a secondary market as consumers bought lightweight plastic jugs to hold the bags. You can read the story here.​

And while Ontario residents may find bags to be useful, economical and simply good market sense, the story from California about Juicero Inc. is pretty much the opposite of all that.

The Juicero is a $400 juicing machine that somehow received $120 million in venture capital funding. It originally cost $699, but the price was dropped a few months back. Yes, those numbers are correct, and I assume the investors were people who have never shopped for anything outside of a Williams & Sonoma catalog. That's if they have ever shopped for themselves at all in the past 20 years or so.

Much like the Keurig coffee machine, the Juicero is part of a whole product line. You don't just buy fruit and put it in a blender. No. In addition to the $400 machine, you also buy flexible Produce Packs — priced individually from $5 to $8 —which you then put into the machine and let the machine squeeze the fruit into juice.

Juicero claimed that the packs only worked with the sheer power of the machine. But as Bloomberg noted in a video that quickly became viral, you could just squeeze the bag with your bare hands and get what appears to be the same result.

Somehow I doubt the Juicero will see as long a shelf life as Canada's milk bags, though I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes a staple in "failed inventions" blogs for the foreseeable future.