Starbucks Challenged
UK inviurnnmentalists City Hippy are calling out Starbucks on their promise to have Fair Trade coffee available at any store at any time by, gasp, actually trying to order the stuff from Starbucks baristas. City Hippy invites their readers to ask for a cup of Fair Trade coffee from their local Starbucks and post the results online. Bloggers write about it in your blog and tag the link "starbuckschallenge" at del.icio.us, non-bloggers can email either cityhippy@gmail.com or greenlagirl@gmail.com.
They've already succeed in drawing attention from the Starbucks Corporate Social Responsibility department. City Hippy's US affiliate reports here:
From the reports we've gotten so far from challengers, it's very, VERY clear that many baristas are trained not to make fair trade coffee until specifically asked for a French-pressed cup (read accounts here, here, here, and here -- there are others). The question now is whether this practice is one mandated by the official training programs (manuals, etc.), or one that's being more informally instituted by individual managers, etc. Certainly a contentious issue either way, but interesting to find out more about --Cindy will check on that and get back to me, and she said she agrees that the tactic is uncool: "It puts the customer in a bad spot," she said.
What I'm really happy about is that Cindy did clear up a lot of questions for me. For example, the Starbucks' policy that mandated that stores brew fair trade coffee on the 20th of each month has been phased out, due to the new "Coffee of the Week" policy (I let her know that the phone reps are unaware of this change in policy). I also found out that Cafe Estima, the new fair trade blend, will be featured as the "Coffee of the Week" every two months (You can be sure City Hippy and I will be checking up on that). I also let Cindy know that Newnan, Georgia is completely unaware that Cafe Estima should be the Coffee of the Week this week -- something else she said she'd look into.
As if the idea of embarassing a huge local green talking but maybe not walking corporation weren't enough of an incentive to jump on board with the Starbucks Challenge, City Hippy are offering a bunch of FairTrade coffee products to whatever account they deem most amusing or informative. Alright, kind of a dumpy prize to be awarded in a highly subjective contest, so maybe sticking it to the man will be enough.
