Anyway, about teh Starbucks(tm) stuff… I dunno, ’cause I don’t drink coffee (but I still apreciate being offered coffee), but their raspberry hot chocolate sucks and makes my tummy gurgle…

I agree that there is nothing inherently wrong with crushing the competition, but I really appreciate your objectivity and observation:

“In a world where power is on the side of the oppressors (cf. Ecclesiastes 4), the powers of business need to be checked. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Well noted… So if a company, lets take the one you work at, has a purpose of being top dog, that’s fine- so long as they do not fall into this trap of placing obsessive monopolization over human compassion.

By the way K, did I mention that I miss The Real Kenny(tm)… Call me sometime, you know the #!

The success of starbucks is not what makes many consider them “evil” – In all honesty, it’s not usually the success of microsoft which pisses many off either. It’s the methods… not the results.

If Starbucks put indies out of business through making a better product, good for them. That’s not how they do it. They have a defined method for entry into a marketplace. They call it cluster bombing.

First, they go into a market and find the leading indie coffee shops. Then they go to the landlord for the coffeshop, and buy the lease out from under them, and replace that shop with a Starbucks. The existing shop then has to move, or go out of business. In the rare case that they cannot buy the lease, they open several starbucks around the shop.. pretty much one on each corner.. and heavily promote to draw the crowd.

That’s just phase one. After that, they get as many franchisees as they can, and open a starbucks /everywhere/ – Thats why there are so many of them. They continue doing this until the starbucks themselves are unsustainable. They literally grow until the sheer number of them puts some out of business… darwinism in a business model. This of course screws the franchisees, who’s parent company is essentially flooding their market… but presumably they know this.

This tactic works. If you are faced with a starbucks on every corner vs. your favorite coffee shop being a 20 minute walk, what happens? You may go to your favorite shop once in a while for the full experience, or great coffee… but when you are in a rush on the way to work, you will likely just grab what’s available. Starbucks.

That last bit is what Starbucks counts on, but it’s also not evil. Availability is just an added value. It’s a fair method of competition (unlike buying someones lease, which is scummy and potentially evil)

The other thing that many complain about is starbucks employee practices. They use a centralized computer system which generates a schedule for each shop based on traffic and peak times at the shop. This is great for starbucks and revenue, but since the schedule doesn’t take into account regularity or employee requests (other than perhaps time off), it essentially creates a random schedule for the low paid starbucks employees which prevents them from holding down a second job. This scheduling side effect is seemingly intended by starbucks, in order to keep people from working elsewhere. But they also carefully prevent people from working more than the maximum hours for being listed as part time. Which means you can’t get a job elsewhere, but you also can’t get overtime. Many will say “they can just go find another job” – but people who say that aren’t living in the real world. Yes, in theory they could – but how? They dont have a stable schedule, and they have bills. They have no stability at work because they are not full time, not capable of becoming full time, and essentially work-at-will style employees. It’s a mess.

The last thing that annoys many about starbucks is incidental. They are a symptom of a larger trend towards homogenizing of culture. Starbucks is part of the disneyfication of the world. America is a gorgeous country geologically. It is amazing to look at the variations in terrain, and in the few remaining untouched areas, it can reach true beauty. But most of america is truly ugly. Every city across the country looks mostly the same, especially out of downtown. Just big cheap boxes holding the same stuff, and all the same neon signs serving the same pre-packaged foods. It’s a cultural wasteland geared only towards making people think they don’t have enough in their life and “need” more to be happy – but the trick is that “more” is infinite, so people are constantly hitting the button for another pellet until they either get huge and die (common), give up and get depressed (increasingly common, especially since there is commercial pressure to sell anti-depressants, increasing the number of depression diagnoses in the first place), or figure out the game (somewhat common) and either play it (most common) or try to find a way out (rare) – It’s a sick thing we’ve built in the past 150 or so years. And there is a way out. Check out adbusters (which I know you already have) – Check out free software. Support it.

All of this doesn’t mean you can never go to starbucks. It doesn’t mean you can’t wear nike or visit disney world. These things are designed to please you and make you want them. The reason people eat fast food is because it tastes so darn good. The important thing is that you realize the consequences of your actions, and you are self aware as you partake of the broken bits in our culture. Then do something to fix it.

This rant should probably have gone on my blog, but it would have likely been out of context.

Also, to ratify a practice with the argument of ‘That’s business’ is not an acceptable argument, and is like justifying a shooting by saying ‘That’s murder’.
Of course the practice is in line with business as you know it, but the point is surely that business as you know it is wrong. The business is what is evil, not Starbucks itself. The physical entity that is the shop has no evil power over anything, it is the business behind the shop that people say is evil. So yes, ‘That’s business’.
Anything that knowingly causes others harm can be justifiably called evil.

It turned out that I awoke rather early this morning at fresh 6:17am. Seeing that I’m scheduled to be @