Showing posts with label Starbucks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Starbucks. Show all posts

Friday, January 13, 2012

Didja hear the one about Starbucks 'blonde'?

. . . we were told at a Regional Rally there are absolutely no Blonde jokes to be told around the coffee what so ever. It will be a written offense if so. This came right from the RD's mouth to about 100 SM's so communicate back to our stores at our own meetings.

It's like the time they told us we could not refer to Via as instant it must be called micro ground but then wrote instant on the packaging...great idea!

-- Comment from the Starbucks Gossip blog

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Power to the percolators!


Would you like to see the definition of insanity?

The epitome of consumerism run wild?

The alpha and the omega of insane faddishness?

Yet another example of planned obsolescence in the name of unnecessarily separating suckers from their no-longer-so-expendable income?

Making a damned cup of coffee a lot more complicated than it has to be?


HERE YOU GO, courtesy of Reuters:
Starbucks Corp, the world's biggest coffee chain, on Sunday said it plans to announce a new product for the single-serve market "in the near future."

Analysts long have expected Starbucks, which also sells Via instant coffee packets, to make a more aggressive move into the small, but fast-growing single-cup brewing segment.

Word of its new plan comes as Starbucks is getting ready for the March 1 termination of an agreement by which it provides coffee discs for Kraft Foods Inc's Tassimo one-cup home brewer.

Kraft's Tassimo brewer won some loyal fans with its bells and whistles, but it was bested by Green Mountain Coffee Roasters' generally lower-cost Keurig brewing system that now has a near-monopoly in the single-cup category with roughly 80 percent market share.

While several analysts expect Starbucks to begin providing coffee for the Keurig system, some also have concerns about expiring Green Mountain patents, patent challenges and whether curr
ent Keurig users will migrate to the company's new machine.

"Starbucks is currently exploring all options to expand its presence in the premium single-cup coffee category, beyond our initial entry with Starbucks Via Ready Brew," Starbucks spokeswoman Lara Wyss told Reuters.

"Single-serve is still in the earliest stages and no clear delivery system has been established as the gold standard so it is important for us to look at all options," Wyss said.
HERE'S THE PROCESS: People threw out their old drip coffee pots and percolators because somebody invented the Mr. Coffee, which was way better because it was NEW! And because it cost more.

But the Starbucks took over the world with espresso drinks and other gourmet coffees, which you couldn't have at home unless you bought an expensive espresso machine, which was better than a $25 stove-top espresso pot because it,
like, cost 10 times as much. Duh!

Espresso makers, though, were too complicated. What was needed was something as simple as a stove-top espresso pot, but would make only one cup of coffee using high-priced, proprietary little packets that fit in little coffee makers that cost $200. This was real progress, which is defined as quadrupling --
through technology -- what the average consumer might have paid in Luddite days for an espresso pot and a hot plate.


ENTER
the Tassimo single-serving coffee maker, for which Starbucks supplies overpriced coffee in little proprietary packets. The Tassimo represented a tenfold leap in progress, as measured by the cost of making a cup of decent coffee increasing from roughly a dime to a dollar.

Progress, however, requires obsolescence. Thus, the inevitability of Keurig -- shoving Tassimo to the margins of java history, and the need for your average coffeeaholic to shell out another $120 bucks -- Look, Marge! Economical coffee at home! The new coffee machine is $80 cheaper than the one we bought last year! -- for the new coffee-making system that's incompatible with the old one.

AND STARBUCKS will be there with a product that we know will be superior to whatever swill you're drinking now . . . because it will cost so much more.

It's
The American Way.

As a card-carrying Democrat, however, I have no interest in The American Way. So you'll see me in the kitchen of our little collective here in Omaha,
by God, Nebraska, spitting in the face of bourgeois society by making myself a cup of communist coffee in a proletarian pot.

On a prehistoric contraption called a stove.

Thursday, May 29, 2008

The naked truth about Michelle


Here's the naked truth. And, no, I'm not talking about the new Starbucks cups.

The naked truth is that it's often useful to change the subject when, like right-wing columnist Michelle Malkin, you're backing an administration guilty of war crimes -- both in pursuit of its "War on Terror" and in its prosecution of an illegal war in Iraq.


LIKE WHEN you start bleating about Rachael Ray's allegedly Jew-hating scarf in a now-canceled Dunkin' Donuts commercial.

But wait.
Didn't Malkin appear in a web ad promoting a conservative T-shirt company selling stuff like this?
And this?
Not to mention this?


NOW WHO'S supporting terrorism? Rachael Ray and her Ay-rab lookin' scarf or Michelle Malkin, endorser of unambiguously fascist T-shirts?

All I know is that given a choice between Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts, those craven appeasers of the waterboard right, I'll get my java jive on with the nekkid mermaid.

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Onward Christian soldiers. . . .

Instead of teaching the children and renewing a culture, a group of Christian jihadists finds it's much easier to just make asses of themselves railing against nekkid mermaids.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune
has the scoop on Starbucks' morning cup o' ho:
Seems that one person's smut is another person's morning latte.

A Christian group out of San Diego has found grounds for outrage over the new retro-style logo for Starbucks Coffee.

The Resistance says the new image "has a naked woman on it with her legs spread like a prostitute," Mark Dice, founder of the group, said in a news release. "Need I say more? It's extremely poor taste, and the company might as well call themselves Slutbucks."

The group, which claims more than 3,000 members nationwide and has found a place advancing various conspiracy theories, is calling for a national boycott of the coffee-selling giant.

The logo will run on Starbucks cups for "several more weeks," said company spokeswoman Bridget Baker, and will live on as the logo for Pike Place bags of coffee.

The image is a less-revealing throw-back version of what the chain used for many years starting when it first opened in Seattle in 1971. That original logo was resurrected in its Pacific Northwest outlets for a time in 2006 to mark the chain's 35th anniversary.


(snip)

The explanation for that initial logo design is explained in the book "Pour Your Heart into It : How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time," written by company founder Howard Schultz:

"[Creative partner Terry Heckler] poured [sic] over old marine books until he came up with a logo based on an old sixteenth-century Norse woodcut: a two-tailed mermaid, or siren, encircled by the store's original name, Starbucks Coffee, Tea, and Spice. That early siren, bare-breasted and Rubenesque, was supposed to be as seductive as coffee itself."
OF COURSE, while our brave and fearless Christian soldiers are defending against the expected onslaught at Pas-de-Calais, the enemy has been having its way with the Normandy sector of the cultural landscape.

Our hapless army has lost its children and surrendered all the parts of the culture that matter. Better, I suppose, to rail against the Starbucks mermaid's bodacious tatas, then beat a hasty retreat into a cultural ghetto that leaves most right-minded folks hungry for "the good stuff" over at Satan's Place.

Sounds like a winning battle plan to me.

FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH, I suppose we're fortunate that Starbucks didn't bring back its original 1971 logo, pictured at right.