Starbucked

P.J. O’Rourke has a typically entertaining and sharp review of Taylor Clark’s recent Starbucked in the NYT book review. O’Rourke especially appreciates Clark’s honest in answering whether Starbucks is a “monster of capitalist rapine.” Some excerpts:

“Clark is frank about his bias: ‘Starbucks diminishes the world’s diversity every time it builds a new cafe, and I can’t help but feel troubled by this.’ But when Clark looks at whether the towering Mount St. Helens that is Starbucks, with its volcanic eruptions of store openings, has buried the competition, he has the grace — not given to every pundit — to look at what he’s actually seeing. Clark informs us that in 1989 there were 585 coffee houses in America. Now there are more than 24,000. Fifty-seven percent of these are what Clark calls ‘mom and pops.’ ‘Paradoxically,’ he writes, ‘the surest way to boost sales at your mom-and-pop cafe may be to have a Starbucks move in next door.’

“Does Starbucks exploit impoverished coffee farmers? Clark points out it couldn’t if it wanted to: ‘Despite its perceived ubiquity, it only buys a little over 2 percent of the world’s coffee.’

“Is ‘Fair Trade’ coffee rather than Starbucks coffee the answer to the third-world coffee growers’ plight? In the first place, Starbucks is the largest international purveyor of Fair Trade coffee, 18 million pounds of it in 2006. And in the second place, no. As of the book’s writing, Fair Trade contracts guaranteed a price of $1.26 per pound ($1.31 if organic) as opposed to free market prices that have fallen as low as 41 1/2 cents per pound in recent years. But applicants for those fair market contracts ‘must obey a structure of rules that often seems more like a socialist wish list than a structure designed to help growers,’ Clark writes. ‘All aspiring farms must be small, family-run plots that are part of democratic, worker-owned cooperatives. Private ownership and capitalist practices are completely off limits — even hiring day laborers can take your farm out of the running.’”