Posted by TheShot on 07 May 2010 | Tagged as: Consumer Trends, Fair Trade
What is it about coffee today that makes it such a lightning rod for consumer indignation and class warfare? Nobody expresses outrage over a $400 bottle of wine, a $110,000 MSRP Mercedes-Benz, or even a $300,000 diamond-encrusted smart phone. But should someone dare sell a cup of coffee for $12, the world is coming to [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 17 Nov 2008 | Tagged as: Consumer Trends, Home Brew, Quality Issues, Starbucks
Not a day goes without us coming across a story about how the sky is falling on retail quality coffee. For example, ABC News laments, “How do you save on coffee in tough times?” Today the Chicago Tribune ran a semi-humorous column titled “Brother, can you spare (buying) a double latte?”
Each one of these stories [...]
Posted by TheShot on 27 Aug 2008 | Tagged as: Home Brew
We previously wrote of our annoyance with the old and ever-popular yarn spun by wannabe personal finance gurus who constantly tell us we can become millionaires by quitting our daily coffee habit — or by replacing it with home-brewed coffee. For the record, we have a lot of coffee both out (as evidenced by CoffeeRatings.com) [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 14 Aug 2007 | Tagged as: Consumer Trends, Quality Issues
Props to the blog wcuk for one of the more thought-provoking posts I’ve read in a while: The Rise of Yuppie Foods « wcuk. It concerns the question of whether the diversification and specialization of common consumable staples — from coffee to wine to chocolate to the restaurants where we eat — is driven less [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 13 Jul 2007 | Tagged as: Beans, Consumer Trends, Starbucks
Anthropologists really should take a closer look at the story of $600-a-pound coffee passed through Indonesian civet droppings, known as kopi luwak. This ‘news’ story has been repeatedly recycled across TV, newspapers, bloggers, and other media throughout the country for several years now — propagating like a Nigerian bank scam e-mail. And just like a [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 18 May 2007 | Tagged as: Consumer Trends, Starbucks
The business world is fraught with a number of ironies. One of the bigger ironies is that all good businesses must do ridiculous things that detract from the very core things that made them good in the first place. Big, public businesses do this in an effort to sustain the growth figures demanded by Wall [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 27 Oct 2006 | Tagged as: Café Society, Consumer Trends
There are few things that illustrate the great divide between the old, traditional way of looking at coffee and something of a more recent way than reactions to the price of coffee. (Neither way of which is more or less correct than the other, mind you.)
On the one hand, we have the new psychology of [...]
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