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 [...]