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| Saved by Starbucks on Oxford Street! |
My point is that no, Starbucks may not be ethical but we do have Costa Coffee down the road in Tesco just 10 minutes from campus, if you really don't like Starbucks, then don't buy their coffee! The company will soon learn to be more ethical if their customers are buggering off to Costa or Cafe Nero! However, I'm very much of the opinion that there should be a choice: put a Starbucks on campus and allow the people to make their own choices as to whether they want to support the company or not... But at least give the option to do so!!
I don't mean to sound like a complete fruitcake (which would go down nicely with a coffee right now) but I frankly don't care where I get my coffee and if Starbucks can provide me with a Skinny machiato wotsit when Costa cannot then I would rather like the option to chose whether or not I want to go into Starbucks to buy it!! Besides, their seasonal drinks are AMAZING-- especially at Halloween when they have pumpkin spice lattes.. Unlike Costa!!
Okay rant and opinion over... It is my opinion, don't harass me for it-- I'm entitled to it! I get very defensive about my coffee. It really is a serious addiction. My name is Cate and I'm a Coffee-holic..................
I do good where I can, nobody is perfect.. If you eat chocolate then you cannot judge me, because small children are seriously injured picking cocoa beans from those plants... If you drink tea you cannot judge, because the way it is farmed is atrocious... If you eat rice you cannot judge me for the people who farm rice get paid a pittance... If you eat mangoes you cannot judge me (look at the carbon footprint caused by the transportation of such fruits)... We can all go down this route but we don't:
I'm just saying that we can't all live in ethical and moral perfection...
I choose not to worry about coffee because it's something I enjoy drinking and I give back in other ways. Like I said we're not perfect and the world will never be truly fixed when it's never fully broken. The world is simply cracked and no matter how much we try we can never change it because there are too many bigots at the top of the chain.
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| Anyone for Fair Trade?! |
Perhaps the uni should consider an independent coffee shop who can fulfil the moral, ethical and student price quota our campus demands?! Perhaps we should open our own Fair Trade Cafe? ;)
No spam, just one comment on them. Despite providing the Guantanamo Bay prison camp with Starbucks coffee kiosks(1)...Despite what the US National Lawyers Guild called its “relentless and illegal anti-union campaign” and “retaliatory firing” of union organisers(2)...Despite six settlements in three years for complaints to the US National Labor Relations Board of violating workers’ rights(3)...Despite providing its US staff with worse health care coverage than Wal-Mart and recently doubling health insurance costs(4)...Despite refusing for six years to give in to pressure from campaigners to ban the genetically engineered artificial ‘recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone’ from its dairy supply chain(5)...Despite criticism for what the World Cancer Research Fund called the “alarming” sale of iced coffee containing over a quarter of a woman’s daily calorie requirement(6)...Despite what Oxfam claimed was obstruction by lobbying against Ethiopia’s trademark applications for its traditional coffee varieties to boost income for some of the world’s poorest coffee growers(7)...Despite increasing CEO Howard Schultz’s income by 25% in 2009, a year in which the company slashed costs by $580 million, partly by reducing its work force by 19%(8)...Despite a US court ordering the company to pay more than $100 million into the accounts of its low wage staff in California after ruling that it had improperly required the workers to share tips with their bosses(9)...Despite petitioning a US Federal Judge to allow the past sexual history of a 16 year old former employee to be revealed in court after she went public over the company’s alleged “failure to act” in a case of aggravated sexual harassment, before settling out of court(10)... Starbucks somehow manages to maintain an image amongst a considerable number of consumers that it is simply a scaled up version of a bohemian Seattle coffee shop selling fairly-traded artisan coffees.
ReplyDeleteAnd despite all of the above it took allegations in the Sun in 2008 that the company was wasting 23.4m litres of water every day (enough to fill the ubiquitous Olympic pool “every 83 minutes”)(11) due to running a tap in-store non-stop, to dent the brand’s reputation in the UK.
References 1 Nick Turse, ‘The Complex: How the military invades our everyday lives’ (Faber, 2008) 2 www.nlg.org/news/statements/StarbucksUnion2006.htm (viewed 25/01/07) 3 www.starbucksunion.org/node/2130 (viewed 15/01/11) 4 www.starbucksunion.org/node/1173 (viewed 15/01/11) 5 www.organicconsumers.org/bytes/ob117.cfm#5 (viewed 15/01/11) 6 BBC www.bbc.co.uk:Iced coffees ‘a meal in a drink’ (26 July 2009) 7 www.bbc.co.uk:Starbucks strikes Ethiopia deal (3 March 2007) 8 Seattle Times:Howard Schultz’s pay increased 25 percent in 2009 (22 January 2010) 9 San Francisco Chronicle: ‘ $100 million tip for Starbucks servers’ (12 June 2008) 10 ww.starbucksunion.org:www.starbucksunion.org/node/712 (viewed 15/01/11) 11 www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/oct/06/water.drought
If you don't like starbucks don't buy it :)
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