600 Starbucks to Close, Hope Anew for Fair Trade?

Starbucks became a publicly held company in 1992 and the race was on. Determined to meet its profit promises to Wall Street, expansion across the US landscape seemed limitless. The Starbucks logo became ubiquitous in malls and along thoroughfares throughout North America and started to pop up in Europe and Asia. But it was in big cities like San Francisco and New York where things really went awry.

Consumers in those two cities have been especially vocal about the urban blight created by "a Starbucks on every corner, sometimes several so close on the same corner that you'd try to meet a friend and end up at the wrong one," said coffee drinker Marian Bush, who lives in the San Francisco suburbs and visits the city regularly for cultural events. Now even real estate analysts quoted in the Wall Street Journal say it appears Starbucks misjudged the risk of putting stores so close together.

Performance artist and consumer rights activists Reverend Billy became so fed up with the proliferation of Starbucks outlets in New York City that he, along with his Choir of Stop Shopping, went to some of the worst offending locations where Starbucks are bunched up together and started performing exorcisms to make his point. He is now prohibited from entering Starbucks outlets by court order.

There is no doubt that the current economic slowdown has affected the average consumer's willingness to pay upwards of $4.00 for fancy mixed coffee drinks with clever names and fructose syrup, and that is not a situation that Reverend Billy is celebrating. He does, however, see a bright lining in the gray cloud of a looming recession and hopes for a better outlook on the consumer coffee drinking scene. He had this to say in his blog:
"Starbucks is still a vicious company with a happy face, like Wal-Mart and so many of that generation of corporations... [and while] our hearts go out to the 7,000 baristas now looking for jobs, out of this moment of pain will hopefully come Fair Trade and sweatfree companies that are good for neighborhoods. It's already happening. It's not reported by Wall Street or the commercial press but small businesses are invented every day."

To which this author adds an Amen!