Re coffee, I am not familiar with the brands available in the US.
In Europe, LavAzza is a perfectly normal (reasonably basic) coffee, but, within that, there are several grades.
However, in some of the strange places I visit, I have learned not to be choosy, and snatch LavAzza wherever I find it. This, in practice, means large stores in the capital at grossly inflated, utterly outrageous prices in countries where salaries are frightfully low - thus, Lavazza, instead of being the 'bargain basement' version of espresso coffee, becomes an expensive and sought after luxury instead. Well, these are places that labour under the delusion that 'Nescafe' instant coffee is a form of progress. You can have no idea of how many hours of my life have been spent in feeble attempts (in a professional context, I have to be polite, even when giving orders), to disabuse my local interlocutors of this opinion.
Apart from LavAzza, another Italian company I find rather good (and very reasonably priced) are the Palombini company; again, they have a range of coffees. Some of the Cuban coffees are also excellent.
It pays to try out beans from a number of different sources (i.e. Costa Rica, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Java, etc). Each has its own specific flavours and strengths; you may find that you develop a marked preference for beans from certain regions.
In general, I like many of the coffee beans from Central and South America, and used to be very impressed by the fact that Costa Rica was both a functioning democracy and a place which produced lovely coffee; so I bought much Costa Rica coffee at one time (and still buy some; however, I find I also like something a little stronger, as Costa Rican coffee can be rather mild).
As a student, in the 1980s, my politics and coffee - most unfortunately - occasionally became even more intertwined than mere good will directed towards Costa Rica. In fact, in the early 1980s, students with a left wing perspective on life loathed the US interventions in El Salvador (the contras, old hands will remember Lt-Col Oliver North and the Iran-Contra affair), and admired the struggling Sandinistas of Nicaragua, and their poetry writing President, Daniel Ortega. (I still deplore much US policy in the region, but view the Sandinista movement a little less glowingly....)
Anyway, given US intervention, and EU ambiguity, on the matter of Nicaragua, we, as idealistic left-leaning students, felt obliged to support the Sandinistas ideologically, and yes, practically, too. So, we dutifully bought vast quantities of Nicaraguan coffee in support of the Sandinista regime, marketed through the student union shops (which, at the time, were also boycotting Israeli oranges, on account of Israeli policies re Palestine, and boycotting South African oranges on account of the policies of apartheid, so, one particular winter, there were no oranges at all for sale in the SU shop; the sacrifices we made for revolutionary change and political progress....). Actually, I know people who travelled to Nicaragua to work on farms and pick coffee beans for the revolution.....
I can honestly say that I have never consumed anything quite so revoltingly foul and unspeakably vile as that revolutionary coffee from Nicaragua. In fact, it led to a cruel dilemma, the sort of dilemma where taste buds battled political principles. Okay, sad to relate, taste buds won the immediate battle - in that, until Nicaraguan coffee improved (well over a decade later, can't begin to ask why, but market forces might have had some say on things), and battled principle to a compromise, in that I continued to support the revolution, just refused to buy anymore of their utterly undrinkable coffee......
So, I started buying coffee from Fair Trade sources, which met the combined needs of ethics and good taste.
Anyway, the point is, coffee beans matter. And the location, and the producer. While true gourmands such as Shrink roast their own, many people don't. The trick then is to find small artisan producers, who source good quality beans - preferably from small ethical sources - and roast small quantities which can be purchased shortly after roasting. At the moment, I buy from small local coffee importers, who roast small amounts which are dated (one date for roasting, another for 'best before') a week or two, at most a month before I get to buy them.
Try several out - beans, and companies; indeed, you may well find that your own tastes change over time (mine certainly did)
