Weird Consumerism
Dec 2, 2008 coffee, general food
Tags: Starbucks
The Boobs are Back
Apr 9, 2008 St. Louis, coffee, missouri
They shut stores down to discuss quality and renew “focus on espresso standards.”
They bought the Clover prompting coffeegeeks to shudder and Stumptown to pull them from their stores.
And starting yesterday the original topless logo has returned to signal Starbucks commitment to quality along with their new Pike Place Roast which Howard Schultz says “is truly one of the best coffees we have offered our customers in our 37-year history and it will reinvent brewed coffee.”
They have also migrated to “30-minute hold times for brewed coffee” and with a renewed focus on quality say that The Pike Place blend is both “Fresh” and “Hand-Scooped.” With all the bags on display in the shop I went to having roasted dates of 3/24 though, it was already two weeks old the minute it arrived.
So take note when you go to buy that next bag of coffee that while local roasters like Goshen, Kaldi’s and Northwest may not have topless logos, they do have fresh roasted coffee that was hand-scooped all along.
Do you think they’ll have to change all those green signs to brown now?
Tags: Goshen Coffee, Kaldi's Coffee, Northwest Coffee, Starbucks
Peet’s Coffee & Tea at Lumière
Jan 2, 2008 coffee, general food
In other Lumière Place news, I also noticed last night that they’ll be the location for Missouri’s first Peet’s Coffee & Tea.
It’s a fairly similar business model to Starbuck’s, so I don’t really expect good coffee from it, but it is worth mentioning as Peet’s is the original inspiration for Starbuck’s. Their founders had known Alfred Peet personally and in fact purchased beans from Peet’s in their first year of business.
Later, one of Starbuck’s founders, Jerry Baldwin, purchased Peet’s with some other investors and then sold off his Starbuck’s shares in 1987 to focus on Peet’s. With about 150 stores nationwide, some might consider it to have been the wrong choice as Starbuck’s operates around 15,000.
Tags: Lumière Place, Peets-Coffee-&-Tea, Starbucks
From the mountains of Panama and Ethiopia, to the urban-jungles of Portland and Chicago, journalist Michaele Weissman takes us behind the scenes for a look at the world of third-wave specialty coffee. How did we get to Starbucks, and where we go from here?