Organic, Carbon-Free Holiday Coffee Cheaper Than Starbucks

Why buy coffee grown with pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers when you can get organic, fair trade, shade-grown, carbon offset coffee for less money?

I was driving home from Thanksgiving when I stopped at a service area off I-95 in Maryland for coffee. Starbucks gives you a free cup of drip coffee with the purchase of a pound of coffee beans & I was nearly out of coffee at home, so I grabbed a bag of Christmas Blend without looking at the price. As the cashier handed my reusable mug back over the counter, I gulped at the price - $16 (with the suggested retail price of $15 covered by a $16 price tag - I guess the service area gouge).

When I got home, I figured it was past time for me to restock my cabinet with coffee from Grounds for Change. Turns out their Holiday Blend is only $13.95 a pound. Yes, shipping is extra, but if you order 5 pounds, including shipping it's just $12.78 a pound.

Not only does Grounds for Change work to reduce or offset its impact at each step of the coffee growing and production process, it's extremely delicious. While I haven't tried the Holiday yet, I know their Sumatra has a great taste without being over-roasted like Starbucks, which can be “burnt and bitter enough to make your eyes water instead of open" as Consumer Reports memorably put it.

Starbucks CEO's Political Advice: Stunningly, Self-Defeatingly, Cynically Wrong

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz blaming "Washington" for our problems is stunningly wrong. "Washington" did not take our economy hostage by creating a debt ceiling crisis. Republicans did. "Washington" did not turn down a $4 trillion deficit reduction package in the name of anti-tax orthodox. Republicans did.

I'm not saying all Democrats are blame-free, but reasonable Americans should not be mad at, say, Bernie Sanders. They should be mad at Republicans.

Saying reasonable Americans should stop contributing to all politicians regardless of sanity is self-defeatingly wrong. A friend approvingly posted Schultz's comments to Facebook, saying, "Stop feeding the monster."

But if you're reading this, you aren't one of the ones feeding the monsters. Just 150 wealthy people & couples have fed new Tea Party favorite Gov. Rick Perry $37 million and have seen a handsome return for their investment. Now as much as ever, America needs reasonable people to be engaged and reasonable politicians to be supported. Grover Norquist and the Koch brothers are not going to stop injecting huge sums of cash into funding Tea Party insanity. Telling reasonable people to boycott politics is equivalent to calling for only the forces of good to be disarmed.

Finally, refusing to assign blame to Republicans is cynically wrong. Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) was the prime mover behind the Tea Party's creation of the voluntary debt ceiling crisis, and Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) & Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) went along with what they knew was bad politics & policy to avoid losing their leadership positions to the Tea Party hordes.

So why isn't Schultz blaming Republicans by name? It would be terrible for business! Can you imagine how much it money it would cost Starbucks if its CEO accurately blamed Republicans for creating political gridlock in an attempt to weaken Democrats & President Obama in advance of the 2012 election? Within minutes, GOP talking heads from Rush Limbaugh to Sean Hannity would be telling their millions of followers to get their lattes from Dunkin' Donuts until Schultz was fired, which he would be in short order. I don't see Starbucks' Wall Street investors standing up for him, do you?

Instead, Schultz takes the easiest of routes - blaming "Washington" and literally asking people to do nothing. Soak in praise from the frustrated while not having to actually stick your neck out to change anything.

Look, if change is going to come to Washington, it's not going to come from a billionaire who screwed over Seattle SuperSonics fans. It's going to come from millions of reasonable Americans deciding that even after a long day of getting the kids ready, getting the kids to school, going to work, putting up with their boss' shit, coming home, making dinner, cleaning up, and getting the kids to bed, they still have enough energy to put pen to paper and write their members of Congress letters asking them to stop fighting about how much to gut education spending and start talking about how much we can reasonably bring taxes back to Clinton-era levels to help build a better America.

And if your members of Congress don't listen to you, find someone to run against them and give them money and knock on doors for them. It's hard work and it takes a long time and you don't always win. But if you want to change things in Washington, we need more reasonable people to roll up their sleeves and do the hard work, not fewer.

Starbucks to Slash Water Waste

A nice move by Starbucks to dramatically cut its wasted water:

Starbucks Corp. is installing new water faucets in its U.S. stores that will allow the company to save about 150 gallons of water a day -- roughly two bathtubs' worth -- at each of its cafes after receiving criticism and as part of a green initiative.

The company said it will no longer run water continuously out of its taps to wash spoons and will instead install new faucets that meter out water. Baristas press the faucet once and high pressure water sprays out long enough to rinse a spoon. The faucets are now being installed in all U.S. stores -- a process that will be completed by September -- and will be delivered to select international stores in the fall. About 600 stores, mainly in California, now have the new faucets.

The wasteful water practices were first uncovered by The Sun last fall.

Starbucks Introduces Their "Boldest Organic Coffee"

Quick post today. I was in Starbucks the other day and was excited to see they've introduced Organic Sumatra-Peru Blend. They're calling it their "boldest organic coffee." Sumatra is my favorite Starbucks blend so downright giddy about the potential of an organic version.

I've been going with the Organic Coffee Company's Java Love, which I can usually get on sale at Harris Teeter (translation: much cheaper than the $13.49 price tag for the Starbucks Organic Sumatra-Peru, not available at The Teet), but Starbucks may convert me. Will the organic Sumatra hold up to its standard counterpart? I'll let you know.

Seattle's Best Coffee Turns Away Reusables

For the second time in two flights on AirTran from Sarasota, FL to National Airport, my trip took at least an hour longer than it was supposed to. With a longer-than-expected layover at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, I grabbed my reusable mug and set off in search of coffee.

Even The Green Miles knows he’s not going to find organic or fair trade coffee in an airport, so I stopped at Seattle’s Best Coffee, a subsidiary of Starbucks. I held my mug out to the cashier and asked her to fill it with regular.

“I can’t do that,” she said. “It’s store policy. I can only sell you coffee in one of our paper cups.”

Unfortunately, I’m no longer surprised by this answer. I’ve had trouble using my reusable mug at two different Dunkin Donuts locations. I checked with Starbucks, which owns Seattle's Best, and they said it's up to individual franchises to decide whether to accept reusable mugs or not.

Every year, Americans drink more than 100 billion cups of coffee. Of those, 14.4 billion are served in disposable paper cups— enough to wrap the earth 55 times if placed end-to-end. Those paper cups contain a plastic lining made from a petrochemical that would produce enough energy to heat 8,300 homes. The plastic makes them impossible to recycle or compost.

You’d think Starbucks would do better since they’re so often accused of greenwashing. While Starbucks coffee cups are made with 10% post-consumer recycled content, they all end up in the trash - 2.3 billion of them every year.

The Starbucks website hosts an extensive corporate social responsibility policy, but it’s long on study and short on commitments. The chain is working with the US Green Building Council to establish LEED standards for the retail sector … but doesn’t say it’s actually committing to making any its stores meet those standards. While Starbucks purchases the equivalent of 20% of its in-store energy use in renewable power, it’s been incredibly slow to embrace fair trade, organic, or shade-grown coffee (respectively, 6%, 4% and 1% of its total coffee purchases).

Even its recognition of global warming is wishy-washy. “Climate change is believed to be the greatest environmental threat of our generation.” (emphasis mine)

The actual Starbucks chain gives a 10 cent discount for reusable coffee mugs. While that discount was given 17 million times in 2006, that’s less than one percent of the 2.3 billion paper cups Starbucks served that year. And reusable mug use actually dropped from 2005 levels. I’ve said before that a 10 cent discount won’t change people’s behavior, and Starbucks is unfortunately proving me right. That long corporate social responsibility policy says nothing about trying to reverse the trend in falling reusable usage.

Reusables: The Big Lie

Nobody loves reusables more than The Green Miles. Toting my reusable coffee mug all over the country. Bringing my reusable grocery bag to Harris Teeter.

But from businesses to environmentalists, there's a Big Lie that people seem to be buying into. The Big Lie is that giving a discount of five or ten cents on your grocery bill or on a cup of coffee will get people to use reusables.

Allow me to detail exactly how many people will change their behavior based on a five or ten cent discount: No one.

Let me repeat that in big bold letters: No one.

Let's take Starbucks as an example. Buy a stainless steel desktop mug for $18.95, and with their 10 cent discount for bringing your own mug, you'll recoup your investment in just 190 cups of coffee! Talk about a lousy return on investment. And that's assuming you don't lose track of the mug by then.

Of course people will use reusables for other reasons, and that discount does help reinforce that behavior. But most people won't bend over to pick up a dime on the street, never mind change their routine because of one.

Why does The Big Lie live on? Because no one wants to discourage stores from doing what they can to promote reusables, so environmentalists feel like they have to take what they can get.

There's only one way to really incentivize reusables, and that's by ending the practice of giving away disposable containers. If you charged 25 cents per bag or per cup, you'd see behaviors change in a hurry. That 25 cents could then go to litter cleanup or recycling efforts. Right now, if someone doesn't properly dispose of their disposable, you pay for its cleanup through your tax dollars.

What's stopping that? No one wants to be the first, or worse yet, the only. Just take a look at British supermarket chain Sainsbury's, which tried to charge for bags:

We did a 'pay-for' trial some years ago where we did charge the cost price for carrier bags to our customers, but our customers where not happy and complained. From these trials we decided to stop charging our customers for carrier bags and fall in line with other retailers.

But a recent JD Power study reported reusables present a strong branding opportunity:

Nearly 45 percent of upscale store customers and 30 percent of midscale customers say that they would like their department store to offer a designer shopping bag that is reusable, which presents an opportunity for stores to provide an environmentally friendly offering. Shoppers 40 years and younger tend to be more interested in reusable shopping bags, compared with their older counterparts.

The bottom line? There are plenty of ways to promote reusables -- environmental education efforts, giveaways of reusables, and financial incentives with teeth. But as Yogi Berra once said, a nickel ain't worth a dime anymore.