Everything but the Coffee (43 page)

35.
This is quite similar to the process described by the theorist John Fiske. As he notes, popular culture can simultaneously act as both a site of oppression and liberation. See Fiske,
Reading the Popular
(Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989).

36.
Harris, “Tully’s Pouring It On for the Planet.”

37.
“Frito-Lay Joins National Green Leadership Program,” Sept. 4, 2007,
www.greenbiz.com/news/2007/09/04/frito-lay-joins-natl-green-leadership-program
.

38.
Susan H. Greenberg, “I’m So Tired of Being Green,”
Newsweek
(International), July 7–14, 2008,
www.newsweek.com/id/143703
; “Have You Got Green Fatigue?”
The Independent
, Sept. 20, 2007.

CHAPTER VII

1.
See Jones’s documentary,
The Siren of the Sea
, available at
www.vimeo.com/adampatrickjones/videos/tag:starbucks
.

2.
Tara Mulholland, “Conscientious Consumption: Ethical Tread Gains in Luxury Market,”
International Herald Tribune
, Nov. 23, 2007. For a couple of intriguing studies on what people will pay in the new economy for social responsibility, see Michael Hiscox and Nicholas F. B. Smyth, “Is There Consumer Demand for Improved Labor Standards? Evidence from Field Experiments in Social Product Labeling,” unpublished manuscript in author’s possession; and Howard Kimeldorf, Rachel Myer, Monica Prasad, and Ian Robinson, “Consumers with a Conscience: Will They Pay More?”
Context
(Winter 2006): 24–29. For a less certain view of consumers’ willingness to pay an ethical premium, see Patrick De Pelsmacker, Lisbeth Drisen, and Glenn Raup, “Do Consumers Care about Ethics? Willingness to Pay for Fair-Trade Coffee,”
Journal of Consumer Affairs
39 (Winter 2005): 363–385.

3.
Quoted by James Lyons, “‘Think Seattle, Act Globally’: Specialty Coffee, Commodity Biographies and the Promotion of Place,”
Cultural Studies
19 (Jan. 2005): 29. For more on the desire for ethical consumption, see Keith Brown, “The Commodification of Altruism: Fair Trade and the Ethos of Ethical Consumption,” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2008; and Sankar Sen and C. B. Bhattacharya, “Does Doing Good Always Lead to Doing Better? Consumer Reactions to Corporate Social Responsibility,”
Journal of Marketing Research
38 (May 2001): 224–243.

4.
For more on the history of this idea, see Lizabeth Cohen,
A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America
(New York: Knopf, 2003). See also Dana Frank,
Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1999); Frank, “Where Are the Workers in Consumer Alliances? Class Dynamics and the History of Consumer-Labor Campaigns,”
Politics and Society
31 (Sept. 2003): 363–379; and Cheryl Greenberg, “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work,” in
Consumer Society in American History: A Reader
, ed. Lawrence B. Glickman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 241–276. For more on boycotts, see Monroe Friedman,
Consumer Boycotts: Effecting Change through the Marketplace and Media
(New York: Routledge, 1999).

5.
Carey Goldberg, “Songbirds’ Plight Starts a Buzz in Coffee Circles,”
New York Times
, July 27, 1997; and Alison Lobron, “Confessions of a Starbucks Regular,”
boston.com
, Dec. 30, 2007,
www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/12/30/confessions
.

6.
On the Starbucks world tour, see Paula Mathieu, “Economic Citizenship and the Rhetoric of Gourmet Coffee,”
Rhetoric Review
18 (Fall 1999): 112–126.

7.
Twelve was the number as of Apr. 2, 2009;
www.starbucks.com/aboutus/farmstories.asp
.

8.
Bruce Finley, “Critics of Starbucks: Gifts Don’t Amount to a Hill of Beans,”
Denver Post
, Apr. 17, 1998. For a list of Starbucks projects with CARE, see
www.care.org/partnerships/starbucks/projects.asp
.

9.
Michael K. Goldman, “Reading Fair Trade: Political Ecological Imaginary and the Moral Economy of Fair Trade Goods,”
Political Geography
23 (Sept. 2004): 891–915.

10.
“Roasting Starbucks,”
Capital Times
(Madison, WI), Apr. 13, 2000; and Margot Hornblower, “The Politics of Coffee,”
Time
, Apr. 10, 2000. The campaign to get Starbucks to buy more fair-trade coffee remains, in fact, ongoing. More information is available at
http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/fairtrade/coffee/starbucks.html
.

11.
The system works like this: Internationally recognized groups inspect farms to make sure they conform to fair-trade guidelines. When they do, they gain certification that the beans grown there are fairly grown. They pay a fee for the services of the certifier. In the United States, the main fair-trade certification group is TransFair. For more on how fair trade works, see Jacqueline DeCarlo,
Fair Trade
(Oxford: One world, 2007).

12.
See, for example, “Starbucks under Fire for Greenwashing,”
www.organicconsumers.org/starbucks/underfire012605.cfm
.

13.
Paco Underhill,
Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), 26.

14.
See
www.starbucks.com
.

15.
“Our Commitment to Ethical Sourcing: Abridged Version of the Corporate Social Responsibility Report” (2007),
www.starbucks.com/aboutus/csr.asp
.

16.
Jon Mooallem, “The Unintended Consequences of Hyperhydration,”
New York Times
, May 27, 2007. See also Charles Fishman, “Message in a Bottle,”
Fast Times
, July 2007; and Elizabeth Royte,
Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2008).

17.
Theresa Howard, “Starbucks Takes Up Cause for Safe Drinking Water,”
USA Today
, Aug. 2, 2005; Karen Blumenthal,
Grande Expectations: A Year in the Life of Starbucks’ Stock
(New York: Crown Business 2007), 138; and Kim Fellner,
Wrestling with Starbucks: Conscience, Capital, Cappuccino
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 225–227.

18.
Melanie Warner, “Also Trying to Sell a Cup of Kindness,”
New York Times
, Sept. 17, 2005.

19.
Bill Kirk, “Starbucks vs. Dunkin’ Donuts: A Study in Contrasts,”
Gloucester Daily Times
, June 15, 2007. I followed up with Guebert, asking her to comment on what she said, but she never answered my e-mail.

20.
See the answer to the question “Shot of Espresso in One Pound of Coffee,” posted Aug. 28, 2006, at
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=760055
.

21.
“Almost Good Guys,”
Consumer Reports
, July 1993, 483.

22.
For details on Rwanda, see Globalis,
http://globalis.gvu.unu.edu
.

23.
Press release, “A Promising Future in Every Pound,” Mar. 13, 2006,
www.csrwire.com/News/5194.html
.

24.
On the rebuilding of the country’s coffee business, see Clay, “Project Fact Sheet,”
www.aec.msu.edu/fs2/fact/rwandafact.pdf.
See also Anne Ottaway, “From Café Ordinaire to Café Extraordinaire,”
Roast Magazine
, Mar./Apr. 2004, 40–48; “Pearl Gives Rwandan Cup a Specialty Profile,”
Coffee and Cocoa International
, Sept. 2004, 24–25; Laura Fraser, “Coffee, and Hope, Grow in Rwanda,”
New York Times
, Aug. 6, 2006; Melanie Stetson Freeman, “Backstory: Beans That Grow Hope,” and Abraham McLaughlin, “Africa after War: Path to Forgiveness— Why Jeannette Employs Her Family’s Killers,”
Christian Science Monitor
, Oct. 24, 2006.

25.
For a terrific and revealing piece of investigative journalism on Ethiopia, see Tom Knudson, “Starbucks Calls Itself Coffee-Worker Friendly—but in Ethiopia, a Day’s Pay Is a Dollar,”
Sacramento Bee
, Sept. 23, 2007. For more on Starbucks’ story, see Hollis Ashman and Jacqueline Beckley, “Coffee with a Conscience,”
Food Processing
, Aug. 1, 2006.

26.
Mark Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 309–310, 353–354.

27.
For more, see
http://store.thanksgivingcoffee.com/product_info?products_id=33
.

28.
Starbucks press release, “A Promising Future in Every Pound,” Mar. 13, 2006,
www.csrwire.com/PressReleasePrint.php?id=5194
.

29.
Jumah Ssenyonga, “Starbucks Reviews African Coffee Projects,”
New Times
(Kigali), Nov. 9, 2006.

30.
Stuart Jeffries, “Risky Business,”
The Guardian
, Feb. 11, 2006.

31.
Fellner,
Wrestling with Starbucks
, 74. For background, see Larry Luxner, “Nicaragua,”
Tea and Coffee Trade Journal
(Jan. 1, 1995): 14–18; Mary Beth Marklein, “Goodness—to the Last Drop,”
USA Today
, Feb. 15, 2004; Chris Bacon, “Confronting the Coffee Crisis: Can Fair Trade, Organic and Specialty Coffee Reduce Small-Scale Farmer Vulnerability in Northern Nicaragua?”
World Development
33 (Mar. 2005): 497–511; and Karla Utting, “Evolution of Ethical Trade,” unpublished manuscript in author’s possession.

32.
On Rivera, see Robert Collier, “Support Brewing for Cooperatives’ Coffee Beans,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, Oct. 14, 1999; Carrie McClish, “Attention Java Junkies, Take Justice in Your Coffee,”
Catholic Voice
, Jan. 10, 2000; and Bruce Finley, “Millions of Producers in Third World Mired in Poverty,”
Denver Post
, Oct. 21, 2001. Rivera’s story is, it seems, rather typical. See sociologist Daniel Jaffee’s case study on the relatively positive impact of fair trade on small stakeholders in one Mexican community,
Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

33.
See a somewhat similar story from Costa Rica where one coffee grower compares Starbucks to the “police” in Manuel Valdes, “Starbucks Changing the Way Costa Rican Farmers Grow Coffee,”
Seattle Times
, Mar. 30, 2008.

34.
Hornblower, “The Politics of Coffee.”

35.
Andrew Cawthorne, “Ethiopia and Starbucks—Another Trademark Row Brewing?”
Mail and Guardian
, Mar. 13, 2006.

36.
Kara Hansen, “Coffee Shop’s Name Gets Bucked from Business,”
Daily Astorian
, Dec. 1, 2005; and John Stoseel and Alan B. Goldberg, “Starbucks vs. Sambucks Coffee,”
abcnews.com
, Dec. 9, 2005.

37.
“Starbucks to Sue Aboriginal Café, Haida Bucks,” Apr. 25, 2003,
www.organicconsumers.org/starbucks/haidabucks.htm
; and Alexandria Gill, “Seattle’s Coffee Giant Sued a 60-Seat Café,”
Globe and Daily Mail
, Aug. 29, 2003.

38.
Hansen, “Coffee Shop’s Name Gets Bucked.”

39.
For this version of the story, I have relied on Gregory Dicum and Nina Luttinger,
The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry: From Crop to the Last Drop
(New York: New Press, 1999), 4.

40.
Stephen Faris, “Starbucks vs. Ethiopia,”
Fortune
, Feb. 26, 2007.

41.
For Starbucks’ descriptions and illustrations, see
www.starbucksstore.com/products/shprodde.asp?SKU=439270
.

42.
For more, see “Statistics on Ethiopian Poverty,”
http://library.thinkquest.org/05aug/01259/statistics_on_ethiopian_poverty.htm
.

43.
Oxfam press release, “Activists in Seattle Join International Call for Starbucks to Play Fair,” Dec. 16, 2006,
www.csrwire.com/News/7094.html
. See also Jason Notte, “Grinding Out a Living,”
Metro
, Mar. 26, 2007.

44.
E-mail from Shayna Harris, Oxfam America’s Coffee Program organizer, Oct. 26, 2006, in author’s possession.

45.
For a smart account of the debate over this strategy, see Fellner,
Wrestling with Starbucks
, 169–170.

46.
“Tell Starbucks to Give Ethiopian Farmers Their Fair Share,”
http://moots.wordpress.com/2006/11/01/make-a-fair-trade-starbucks/
.

47.
Rosemary Ekosso, “Starbucks and Ethiopian Coffee: The Bitter Taste of Exploitation,”
www.thenewblackmagazine.com/view.aspx?index=488
.

48.
Emad Mekay, “Starbucks vs. Ethiopian Coffee Farmers,”
Mail and Guardian
(London), Mar. 22, 2007.

49.
“Starbucks ‘Blocks’ Ethiopian Coffee Bid,” Oct. 26, 2006,
www.bushdrums.com/news/index.php?shownews=368&PHPSESSID=5534f05ce71088d8111c3940c3
.

50.
Alexia Garamfalvi, “Ethiopian Coffee Dispute Runs Hot and Cold,”
Legal Times
, Mar. 5, 2007.

51.
Douglas B. Holt, “Brand Hypocrisy at Starbucks,”
www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/starbucks/
; Faris, “Starbucks v. Ethiopia”; and Kaleyesus Bekele, “Starbucks Efforts to Silence the ‘Big Noise,’” allafrica.com, Feb. 27, 2007,
allafrica.com/stories/200702240151.html
.

52.
Madeleine Acey, “Ethiopian Coffee Trademark Dispute May Leave Starbucks with Nasty Taste,”
The Times
(London), Nov. 27, 2006.

53.
Thomas Omestad, “In DC Visit, Starbucks Tries to Brew a Good Guy Aroma,”
U.S. News & World Report
, Mar. 16, 2007; and Janet Adamy and Roger Thurow, “Brewing Conflict: Ethiopia Battles Starbucks over Rights to Coffee Names,”
Wall Street Journal
, Mar. 5, 2007.

54.
Dave Bollier, “Starbucks, Trademarks, and Coffee Colonialism,”
http://onthecommons.org/node/1108
.

55.
Craig Harris, “Starbucks in Marketing Accord with Ethiopia,”
seattlepi.com
, June 20, 2007.

56.
Tania Padgett, “WAKE UP and . . . Discontent Heard at Starbucks,”
Newsday
, Aug. 8, 2004; Anya Kamenetz, “Baristas of the World, Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Company Mandated Cheerfulness,”
New York
, May 25, 2005; Kris Maher and Janet Adamy, “Do Hot Coffee and ‘Wobblies’ Go Together?”
Wall Street Journal
, Mar. 21, 2006; Mischa Gaus, “Starbucks Gets Wobbly,”
In These Times
, Oct. 4, 2006; Daniel Gross, “Latte Laborers Take on a Latte-Liberal Business,”
New York Times
, Apr. 8, 2007; David Segal, “Coffee Break: ‘Top Employer’ Starbucks Has a Crack in Its Image,”
Washington Post
, Apr. 12, 2007; and
Brendan Brosh, “Steamed Workers Taking on Starbucks,”
New York Daily News
, Aug. 21, 2007. On the violations, see Steven Greenhouse, “Board Accuses Starbucks of Trying to Block Union,”
New York Times
, Apr. 2007; and Sewell Chan, “Starbucks Accused of Firing Outspoken Barista,”
New York Times
, June 19, 2007.