Death by Caffeine
August 30th, 2005 by atari
According to , it would take a mere 18 cups of a large Starbucks coffee to kill me. Not that this is particular to Starbucks—you also have the option to find out how many of your other favorite caffeinated beverages it will take to kill you (112 cans of Red Bull, 265 bottles of Coke).
The unreasonable part, though, is that I’m willing to bet that many people don’t realize that a Starbucks Grande coffee has over than . Let’s not even talk about the Venti.
Plus, Starbucks is just generally unreasonable. I’ll take any opportunity I can to highlight this. After all, it is the place where you have to and where they’re . Sounds like the type of place where I’d want to spend my last days…
August 30th, 2005 at 5:18 pm
Drinking unreasonable amounts of coffee is, of course, unreasonable, but coffee itself—and particularly strong coffee—is not even kind of unreasonable. it’s a pretty effective way for reasonable people to lubricate their interface with an unreasonable world.
yes, i’m biased—i’m not only (heavily, but not as much as I once was) addicted, i also currently make my living .
i’m going to go ahead and say: hip as it may be to hate on starbucks (I mean, I’m sure proud of the time I spent with ), they’re, while not exactly defensible, certainly an interesting and complicated case, and both a blessing and a curse for the fair trade movement. they sell fair trade badly—they treat it as a separate line, as though it were a roast, rather than as a purchasing avenue and a fair and just one at that. and they serve fair trade coffee as their featured roast only one day a month (it’s the third tuesday). and they’re fighting unionization, as good as their benefits package may be (to be fair, it’s the IWW, which anyone reasonable shouldn’t want anything to do with, but that’s of course not the point if employees choose it). all true, all troubling to say the least. but then also: they’re in continual talks with oxfam and equal exchange, and are moving towards, if not believing in fair trade, doing more to appease those of us who do (for example: many of their new special blends, sourced from specific featured regions, are fair trade, a step away from the fair-trade-is-a-roast treatment). their clientele, expensive as their coffee may be, is actually very diverse class-wise. this makes sense: none of us actually want to advocate dunkin’ donuts coffee. it’s no more fair trade than starbucks, and if you compare the price per caffeine shot, it’s actually not particularly less expensive. plus it’s sort of soulless to intentionally design your stores for people to not want to hang out, cooptive as starbucks’ design may be.
also, one of the interesting effects of starbucks, and why oxfam and equal exchange are so set on negotiating with them, is that starbucks’ rise has been about as good for the fair trade movement as bad. fair trade coffee is more expensive than what americans are used to, even if it’s profit margins that should absorb the cost. for a while at least, and for consumers, it’s going to cost more to buy. it does now from just about every brand that sells it. starbucks is the reason that people are willing to spend more for coffee: they got us used to the idea. and their ability to sell their coffee in the US, and to get it visible throughout the country and accessible across the socioeconomic spectrum, starbucks has been a huge help, almost despite themselves. Yes, they could, and (i, like many people, would argue) must, do more to make their millions responsibly. but compared to their competition, they’re not actually that much worse. and their critical place in the fair trade movement is only more evident in the lengths that fair trade groups will go in attacking and also reaching out to them.
i also just like the free bathrooms. pedestrian culture is important, and this isn’t europe.
August 30th, 2005 at 5:43 pm
but why does their coffee suck so much? i swear it’s worse than dunkin’ donuts’...
August 31st, 2005 at 2:46 am
I wonder what happens to your soul (in a karmic sense) if you die in a Starbucks from a caffeine overdose. Best guess – You’re reincarnated as a Presidential Candidate.
For the record though, this post makes me want to order a Grande, Starbucks style. Who new so much Caffeine could be mine in a single cup. For the record I need to be up in two hours to “be a design consultant” and may in fact still be drunk as of the writing of this post. Damn you free drinks. Eyes currently flickering closed. Bye now.
August 31st, 2005 at 8:11 am
I think the answer is:
As a business, starbucks = reasonable and ridiculously good at what they do.
As a friend (to the little guy, to consumers, to farmers, to the world) starbucks = so-so to unreasonable
As a free bathroom starbucks = priceless.
Perhaps that summary is hokay?
I kind of wish they had better non-coffee non-tea drinks for those of us like me who don’t like that shit but who enjoy the company of people who MUST GO TO STARBUCKS.
Badunno.
August 31st, 2005 at 11:53 am
it is obviously a step forward that they are selling fair trade in the first place, but i do agree that there is more that they could do to promote it. purely profit-wise, it is against their interest to do so, as i’m sure the profit margins are much lower (and hence the higher prices). but i honestly think it is up to people like us to put pressure on them to do so. if it makes good PR, they will continue to do it.
and i do admit my strong bias against starbucks in the post. i’m also somewhat of an anomaly—i don’t even drink coffee…
August 31st, 2005 at 11:55 am
oh sorry—another unreasonable part of starbucks: their interior design. i hate it!
August 31st, 2005 at 1:22 pm
If only Starbucks actually served FT coffee once a month! They say they do in all their communique, but I’ve yet to see this done—My experiences here:
ePebble—I totally agree that Starbucks is a complicated situation—Some would say Starbucks actually helps coffee farmers by making people drink better tasting, higher priced coffee that tends to benefit farmers more than the Folgers stuff. And I wish wish wish LA had a real street culture.
Still—a street culture of Starbucks, Carl’s Jr, and Target isn’t exactly what I have in mind. And I really, really don’t like being lied to by big corporations. I mean, it’s not even about trying to get Starbucks to do more for fair trade—They don’t even do what they say they’re doing—which isn’t much!
August 31st, 2005 at 1:43 pm
Starbucks is hatable b/c the push out the previously already overpriced coffee shops who let me put up flyers and posters, pointing people to interesting community events. Starbucks won’t let me put up flyers, they forcibly aren’t a community hub, and they lock their CD players.
I don’t drink coffee, I don’t really like it, I just want there to be coffee shops that I can go to and put up stupid signs. I want to be able to hear bands I don’t know or like on the CD player, not Nora Jones compilation records.
Sayin’
August 31st, 2005 at 3:37 pm
word.
the lack of a local community atmosphere has a lot to do with the reason why i hate starbucks. in berlin, shanghai, new york, and paris it has the same horrible interior design and the same horrible music with overpriced coffee. (btw, it is even more overpriced in europe.) i don’t know about everyone else, but i would much rather sit in a local cafe in any of those places…
August 31st, 2005 at 10:10 pm
yes, and i hated watching the starbucks go up on st marks. but in the strip malls of minnesota? i’m not really sure it’s reasonable to hate on that.
yes, the design’s lame. and the homogenization of otherwise potentially diverse consumer culture is sick, if system-wide. and i wish the mermaid still had her nipples. i prefer local places and choose them when i can. but there are times when i’m glad the coffee’s strong and right there. and that’s reasonable of me, i think.
(also i don’t know shit about the LA starbucks, but i don’t actually think the lie’s intentional about how frequently they serve the fair trade: the gap between what management says franchises are selling and what the featured brands are in the field is wide on all the roasts, not just the fair trade line.)
September 1st, 2005 at 12:46 am
2.0 and I visited the first day of the first Starbucks in Paris.
Paris does not need Starbucks.
That said, I think it is fine to have it in train stations and the like. I do not like hating on flyers or their sucking-dry-places-I-like technique. But would note that they have been quite unsuccessful in Olympia, WA, due to community staunchness, and it’s not for lack of trying.
I like coffee. Mmmmm.