Why do I, personally, hate Starbucks?
Service December 20th, 2005Personally, I hate them because their coffee sucks and they are everywhere. You can’t escape them. However, there are plenty of other great reasons to hate Starbucks: (Before the Starbuckers begin their rebuttals, yes I know they sell Fair Trade coffee. But why do they continue to sell Un-Fair Trade coffee? All the drinks are made with sweatshop style labor. The Fair Trade stuff is sold in the bean form only, to go. The sales of Fair Trade make up less than 0.001 % of total sales for the company.)
Without further ado:
1. The vast majority of the coffee is grown using underpaid third world labor.
2. Starbucks is spreading across the world like a virus, infecting cultures with their formula of what a coffee shop should be.
3. They are everywhere.
4. They have predatory business practices. Common practices are things like paying landlords to not renew leases for coffee shops so that they can move in.
5. They sell fake corporate responsibility.
6. I think that their coffee sucks. It is always bitter.
7. The gross profit margin per store is, on average, 59.1%, therefore there is plenty of wiggle room for the company to pay more than a dollar a pound for coffee. (read: livable wage for their slave labor)
8. Faux ecologic responsibility.
9. False employee benefits. They give part time workers (20 hours per week) health insurance. However, I have received hundreds of emails from employees that consistently receive 19.75. 15 minutes shy of earning those costly benefits.
10. The crap they sell is incredibly unhealthy. Get the nutritional information, from their website it is appalling. The Caramel Pecan Sticky Roll (which has more fat than a Big Mac) or even better (worse), the Eggnog Latte are so bad for you, it is astounding.
That is just a start. I don’t really have enough time to put up all the reasons.
If you want more reasons, I suggest you read the quarterly report (10Q) on the investor relations portion of their website, but do it with a calculator, and read between the lines. The company publishes the reasons why you should hate them on their very own website.
Credits: ihatestarbucks.com
4 Responses to “Why do I, personally, hate Starbucks?”
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December 31st, 2005 at 12:37 pm
You make some great points about the fairtrade, but point #6 about Stabucks coffee always being bitter implies that you do infact frequent Starbucks and buy they coffee - way to stick to your guns and stand by your convictions!
January 4th, 2006 at 1:24 am
Devilsadvocate perhaps the individual is speaking as an ex-customer of starbucks. Maybe there was a time that ihatestarbucks.com frequented starbucks. Maybe they are a coffee critic, oh the possibilities are endless.
January 7th, 2006 at 4:50 pm
Ihatetrolls & ihatestarbucks.com: which came first - the hatred of fake corporate responsibility or the disdain for bitter coffee. Would faux ecological responsibility and predatory business practices be acceptable as long as the coffee is to your liking?
I’m with devilsadvocate on this one, don’t be a hypocrite.
January 19th, 2006 at 10:11 pm
Dear Ringa and DevilsAdvocate,
Hi, I am the owner of IHateStarbucks.com
I have had their coffee and used to drink it. I’m not giving equal weight to all the reasons to hate the company, I was providing a number of them. It isn’t hypocrisy, it is diversity of opinion. The reasons weren’t exclusive; I was trying to be inclusive.
Your heads are in your asses. You pair of holier than thou dime-store Messiah’s.
Get cancer,
IHateStarbucks.com