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Item: The Cost of Cheap in the Morning
Posted: 8/10/2011 6:57:43 AM
A recent visit to a Comfort Inn got me thinking about the actual costs of a free breakfast for all of us. ...
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Item: Reading Signs
Posted: 8/2/2011 8:41:03 AM
Starbucks overclaims in another in-story sign. But it is for "you" they are doing it. ...
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Item: Green Fatigue
Posted: 5/11/2011 5:43:19 AM
Why are green products not selling? Is because of the cost or because people have lost interest in green ideas?...
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Item: Reading But the Latte Lines
Posted: 4/13/2011 4:42:10 AM
This is a blog I wrote about the "politics" behind Howard Schultz's new book. It appeared on the Fast Company web-site. ...
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Item: Starbucks Looking to Buy Peet's
Posted: 3/24/2011 1:43:55 PM
So what does this mean? ...
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Item: On the New SuperSized Starbucks
Posted: 2/23/2011 8:54:05 AM
Here are my thoughts on the new 31 Oz drink from a Temple News article. ...
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Item: The Rough Democracy of Buying
Posted: 11/1/2010 3:51:33 PM
Can corporations be moved? This case of fair trade suggests, yes, they can. But you have move them. ...
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Item: Coffee and Class Warfare, Part 12
Posted: 10/18/2010 1:08:31 PM
More of the fight between Starbucks users and Dunkin Donuts users....
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Item: Fighting the Man -- A NY Professor Refuses to Speak Starbucks
Posted: 8/17/2010 8:27:55 AM
New York Post Headline:
Grammar stickler: Starbucks booted me...
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Item: Starbucks and Facebook -- Some Interesting Numbers, but what do they mean?
Posted: 7/27/2010 6:30:51 PM
Starbucks just past the 10 million fan mark on Facebook. What can we make of this? Are you a Starbucks "fan"? What does it mean? What does being a Facebook friend mean? (Let me know.) ...
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Item: All that is Global is Local
Posted: 7/7/2010 5:37:03 AM
Here is a piece I wrote that appeared on YaleGlobal Online Magazine. It looks at how the global gives rise to the local. ...
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Item: Starbucks and Obama
Posted: 6/17/2010 1:00:56 PM
Today on right hand side of my facebook page under recommended pages there was a picture of the Starbucks logo and it said many who like Barack Obama like Starbucks. (Later it said, many who like Obama like Alicia Keys.)...
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Item: The Triumph of the Little Guys
Posted: 6/14/2010 7:20:37 PM
Starbucks is now responding to the independents -- one way to see the company's move to offer free wi-fi. ...
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Item: Out There in the Middle
Posted: 6/7/2010 6:30:53 AM
Riffing off of James McMurty and thinking about Starbucks' "frontier strategy" of rural development and beyond. ...
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Item: The Class Politics of Via
Posted: 5/17/2010 1:13:19 PM
Starbucks isn't just selling instant coffee. It trying to rework the meaning of instant coffee by not so quietly talking about class. ...
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Item: Sip Your Own Adventure
Posted: 5/3/2010 10:41:10 AM
Virtual tourism. That is what Starbucks is selling in this ad from last week's New York Times. Really the selling of virtual tourism is quite common in the developed world, and has been for a long time. Beginning really in the 1920s, retailers regularly offered customers easily consumed cardboard cuts outs of Paris, Venice, and Tahiti. But what they were really selling, and what Starbucks continues to sell, is a combination of emulation and safety. ...
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Item: Everything But the Coffee Comes to Nashville
Posted: 4/28/2010 2:45:23 PM
See the Poster Below. I will be in Nashville on May 13 and 14...
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Item: Coffee Parties and Coffeehouses
Posted: 4/18/2010 10:19:29 AM
Thinking about the Coffee Party, the Tea Party, and the more troubling, Hard-ballization, as I would call it, of American politics. ...
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Item: The Great Coffee Give Away
Posted: 4/15/2010 6:48:29 AM
Dateline April 15. Starbucks is giving away free cups of brewed coffee today if you bring in your own tumbler. But like most things Starbucks, what is interesting here is how the company is pitching this give away, what it is really saying and what it isn't saying. ...
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Item: A Real Do-Gooder
Posted: 4/14/2010 6:39:27 PM
Some thoughts on a Starbucks Ad...
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Item: Howard Schultz and Depression
Posted: 4/9/2010 1:52:35 PM
Howard Schultz spoke to Nightline last week. Here is some of what he said....
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Item: More on the Cups
Posted: 4/2/2010 10:07:48 AM
An update on Starbucks and its cups -- the mountains of cups it uses to serve its 3 billion annual customers....
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Item: To Starbucks or Not to Starbucks
Posted: 3/23/2010 12:59:35 PM
A Starbucks battle is brewing in my neighborhood. ...
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Item: The Morning Buzz
Posted: 3/18/2010 4:32:25 AM
Value is a difficult thing to calculate. For a long time, people have complained that Starbucks is overpriced. Over the last years, as the company has lost some of its cache, these complaints have grown. But in one respect, Starbucks has always been a bargain. It offers a lot of caffeine for the buck. ...
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Item: Cheap(er) Coffee -- What does it say?
Posted: 3/12/2010 8:27:38 AM
"$1.50 Every Day. As sure as the sun will rise."
That is what Starbucks advertised along the bottom of the front page of yesterday's New York Times. Claiming in slightly smaller print that it has been "batch roasting since 1971," the company is now promising a cheaper cup of tall Pike Place Roast coffee everyday.
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Item: Fair Trade, Boycotts, and Starbucks
Posted: 3/10/2010 9:45:20 AM
In its corporate social responsibility reports, on the back of its cups, and in its press conferences, Starbucks points to its fair trade purchases. And the company is the world's largest consumer of fair trade coffee (though this amounts to only about 7 percent of all the coffee it purchases.) But Starbucks wasn't really an industry leader on this front; it had to be pushed into its fair trade purchases. The shove came from yet another boycott....
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Item: Starbucks, Guns, and Money
Posted: 3/4/2010 6:53:24 AM
Starbucks is back in the news, this time for not banning guns. Here is the background. Over the last month, organized gun owners have walked into Starbucks and other businesses to test state laws that allow gun owners to carry weapons openly in public places. Gun control advocates, including members of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, have protested. ...
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Item: Two More Starbucks Boycotts
Posted: 3/2/2010 9:42:55 PM
Singapore's Chua Chin Hon wrote in the Straits Times in 2003, "I'm no anti-globalization protestor, nor am I about to become one. ...
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Item: Boycotting Starbucks, Part One (of Several)
Posted: 3/1/2010 9:31:16 AM
Over the years, there have been a slew of boycotts against Starbucks. In my book, I talk about what it means to buy Starbucks, but I collected a lot of information about not buying Starbucks as well. In the next couple of weeks, I want to relate some of these stories of boycotting Starbucks and what they say about where we in the global marketplace....
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Item: Starbucks and Fair Trade
Posted: 2/23/2010 8:14:31 AM
Another look at Starbucks and its Fair Trade-ish policies. ...
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Item: Selling Main Street and Hard-Working Americans
Posted: 2/10/2010 5:14:36 PM
Maybe you haven't noticed it though the students in American Studies 375: Cooking Up a Storm: Exploring Food in American Culture did. There is, they know, a class war going on out there on the television. It is a war being waged by middling brands (and allegedly populist politicians.) The key weapons in this fight are words and flag waving. ...
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Item: The Secret to a Happy Ending
Posted: 2/9/2010 11:17:34 AM
Check this review from the Washington Post of Barr Weissman's New Film about the legendary Drive-By Truckers (and the requisite academic)...
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Item: Speaking Starbucks and a Sociology of Customer Service
Posted: 2/9/2010 10:26:28 AM
"Ordering coffee," writes a New England journalist, "isn't what it used to be. Today you need to be proficient in a new language: "Starbucks." Just the other day, I had a most unfortunate encounter with the barista (Starbucks clerk) who didn't understand what I was talking about."...
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Item: Boycotting Starbucks Speak
Posted: 2/9/2010 10:13:58 AM
Thanks to my friend, Angleo Coclanis, for sharing with me this scene from Role Models....
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Item: Wireless and Cafe Culture
Posted: 1/31/2010 9:04:04 PM
"Where did cafe culture go?" asks Leah McLaren of Canada's national paper, the Globe and Mail. Out the door with free wireless she claims. ...
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Item: Coffee Wars and Class Warfare
Posted: 1/25/2010 1:17:46 PM
Since the fall, Dunkin' Donuts has been running a new ad campaign and it is about Starbucks, but really it is about class and ideas about class in contemporary America.
I just saw an advertisement during the Jets-Colts game for Dunkin' Donuts, announcing that Dunkin' beat Starbucks in a blind taste test. But the ad also makes clear this is about more than coffee, it is about class or really perception and pretention. In the ad, we are told that a majority of HARDWORKING Americans prefer Dunkin' Donuts to Starbucks.
Hardworking Americans. The idea links Dunkin' Donuts to ordinary Americans and to a common sense style of purchasing and of utility. Starbucks in this binary is linked to the rich and frivolous. The ads further suggest that Dunkin' Donuts is about coffee, while Starbucks is about "couches and music" - really it is about people more interested in the frills of the brand than the actual qualities of the product.
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Item: The Hangover
Posted: 1/21/2010 9:27:42 AM
Coffee may wake you up, but it won't sober you up, a new study shows. Researchers have concluded that while drinking coffee after consuming alcohol may make you feel more awake, it doesn't actually make you more sober - and that combination could lead to poor decision-making, reports WebMD.com. "Coffee may reduce the sedative effects of alcohol, which could give the false impression that people are not as intoxicated as they really are," Thomas Gould, PhD, of Temple University told WebMD.com. Gould added that people who have only consumed alcohol are more likely to feel "tired and intoxicated," and more importantly, acknowledge that they're drunk.... ...
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Item: The Intention of Business
Posted: 1/18/2010 2:18:04 PM
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Item: Methland: Death and Life of an American Small Town
Posted: 1/13/2010 1:44:16 PM
Maybe the nonfiction book of the year -- last year....
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Item: The Art of Public Space
Posted: 1/7/2010 4:02:04 PM
"There is," he writes about top down kinds of places, "an 'art of public space,' which requires more than no-car signs, traffic cones, concrete barriers, tables and chairs. Happily, New York possesses an urban resource ideally suited to creating public space: artists."...
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Item: Brand Avoidance
Posted: 12/22/2009 1:17:25 PM
Last week, Roy Street Coffee and Tea, located at the corners of Roy Street and Broadway in Seattle, opened. This is another one of those stealth Starbucks - Starbucks stores without the Starbucks name over the front door - the coffee giant has been opening in its hometown and in London as of late. Like the other shops of this new vintage, this one is appointed with antiquey furniture, retro lighting, and a distressed looking table top salvaged from an old ship....
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Item: Lost Connections
Posted: 12/22/2009 1:06:11 PM
"Misery," Sander and Putnam write, "it turns out, doesn't love company. Distressing new research shows that unemployment fosters social isolation not just for the unemployed but also for their still-employed neighbors. Moreover, the negative consequences last much longer than the unemployment itself. Policymakers have focused on short-term help for the jobless, but they must address these longer-term community effects, too." ...
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