Entries Tagged 'Coffee' ↓

Starbucks asks: Coffee, Tea, or MP3
I can’t decide whether I love or hate this idea.

(Tags: Starbucks, digital audio, convergence)

I’m starting to think that Starbucks doesn’t care quite as much for the poor farmers that grow their beans as they try to portay.

Some background: In the late 90s, Starbucks started selling a Fair Trade Certified blend called, creatively enough, “Fair Trade Blend”. Fair Trade certification is essentially an assurance that products with that label meet certain criteria regarding the price marketers pay the producers, ecological friendliness, and care for the producing communities. Great goals, yes?

Anyway, despite heavy promotion and marketing, Starbucks’ Fair Trade Blend never quite took off the way they’d hoped. The reason (in my estimation)? It tasted bad. Really bad. I recall the first time I tried FTB, as a matter of fact. It was some time during my first week as a Starbucks employee. I, along with a couple of my fellow Shift Supervisors had been “cupping” (coffee-snob speak for “tasting”) different coffees during downtimes in order to learn more about the subtleties of the blends. When FTB’s turn came up, I remember feeling a certain excitement to taste it . . . as if the social conscience attached to it somehow meant that it would taste incredible.

Wrong.

Even with my then-limited coffee knowledge, I could quickly tell that this was the worst “real” coffee* I’d ever had in my life. Absolutely no body, and tasted something like sawdust. I distinctly remember the facial reaction of one of my co-workers (who happens to now be a store manager for Starbucks in southern Alabama) . . . he looked up from his cup, puckered his lips, and smacked slowly, as if he was trying to get the taste of some horrible medicine to leave his mouth.

All of this to say . . . Café Estima Blend, Starbucks’ newest Fair Trade Certified brew (complete with Social Responsibility hype and marketing) tastes worse, if that’s possible, than Fair Trade Blend. Why do they insist on giving these poor farmers such a bad name? I’ve had GREAT Fair Trade Certified coffees from other companies, and somehow the world’s largest coffee chain can’t manage to get one right.

(*”Real” coffee excludes such sludge as Folgers, Taster’s Choice, and Maxwell House.)

Completely unrelated to Church Search 2005, my buddy JDR of the .Net and I are on the hunt for the best coffee and espresso in town.

Like I, he’s a coffee enthusiast, and like I, he’s a recent immigrant to the east side of Columbus, OH. Unlike I, he seems to have already found a church to call home, but neither of us have a café to call the same. Knowing how passionate I am about good coffee, he issued something of a challenge to me in his blog to search for the best coffeeshops around Columbus.

The challenge was accepted, and the first chapter completed this past Friday. I’ll be writing about it soon.

(By the way, some of you may have noticed that I’ve been throwing in a few more “everyday life” entries — like this one — here and there. I’m considering re-purposing this blog — yes, again — into something that more fully reflects the whole of my life . . . not just the lofty and theological. I’d like to talk about other things that interest me, like technology and home improvement/design and family life and health and such. If I indeed decide to do this, my hope is that it will remain decidedly God-centered, as following Christ is something I’m supposed to do in every aspect of my life . . . and the theological stuff will still be here. Just not necessarily all the time. Let me know what you think.)

As some of you may know, Starbucks is not only my big-market coffeehouse of choice, but also a former employer of mine. As even more of you probably know, the church my family and I were most recently members of (before we moved away) is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. While I wasn’t raised in a Baptist church, and while my religious affections sometimes line up better with those of Presbyterians, I still usually answer “Baptist” when asked what “kind” of Christian I am.

Imagine my eye-rolling, then, when I saw a headline on the Baptist Press News website that read “Starbucks promotes homosexual agenda with coffee cup”. (Yes, those are the exact words. Click for yourself.) Apparently, some folks in my denomination think that simply printing a quote in which someone mentions the fact that he’s gay is a form of “blatantly push[ing] the homosexual agenda”.

See, Starbucks recently started a campaign called “The Way I See It”, in which people (some famous, some not-so-much) submit blurbs to be quoted and printed on their ubiquitous paper cups. These quotes run the gamut: from the intellectual, to the philisophical, to the whimsical, to the downright silly (and some stops in-between). The “controversial” quote in question is from Armistead Maupin, an American author. In it, he speaks of the fear that prevented him from “coming out” as a gay man. To make it worse, he uses an “expletive” (likely damn) in the quote. (Click here to see the actual quote on an actual cup. The “expletive” was censored by BPNews.net.) The mere mention of homosexuality apparently sets off alarms in the minds of uber-conservative public policy group Concerned Women for America, and those bells resound in the minds of some folks at Baptist Press News. Thus far, they’ve stopped short of calling for a boycott of Starbucks, but there are already rumblings of such evident in the article.

Now, the way I see it, this is silly. Starbucks is no more “promoting the homosexual agenda” by printing Maupin’s quote than they are promoting conservatism and the war in Iraq by printing a quote from National Review Online editor-at-large Jonah Goldberg. (Of course, I wouldn’t be terribly shocked if some idiot leftists out there were decrying Starbucks for doing such a thing in much the same fashion as the SBC and CWA.) Granted, the article also speaks of Starbucks’ sponsorship of “gay pride” events in some west-coast cities, but what they fail to realize is that such sponsorships are the prerogative of individual stores and their managers . . . it is not a corporate edict. Furthermore, the participation of the employees in such events is entirely voluntary.

Now, am I saying that sin should be celebrated or even ignored? Of course not. What I am saying is that instead of obsessing over coffee cups and pride marches, perhaps my Baptist brothers’ and sisters’ time and energy would be better spent lovingly showing sinners the freedom that they themselves have found at the Cross.

After all, life is too damn short.

To see some other bloggers’ thoughts on this . . .
Agent Tim Online
Issues that Matter
Virtue Blog
Reformissionary

(It should go without saying that my inclusion of the above links doesn’t constitute my agreement with their contents . . . but Steve McCoy’s got it about right. )