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Jaimie Harrison, store manager of the Kent Square Starbucks, said, “We don’t get as much business as the Starbucks on University City Boulevard because a lot of people don’t know that we are even here.”

Since its opening on Aug. 12, the Kent Square Starbucks is “having parking issues,” Harrison said.

Smaller coffee shops are also beginning to prosper in Blacksburg.

“We are part of a franchise out of Winchester, Va. which has been around for 10 years and spreading south down Interstate 81, there are also goals to open shops in Texas and California,” said Jen Christopher, shift manager of the Daily Grind Coffee House.

Christopher said the store originally opened in January 2002, but it closed in October 2004 because of bad management and opened again six weeks ago after a complete renovation.

“We are reaching a point where regular customers are putting the word out, but there hasn’t been much advertising thus far. We’re making plans to begin advertising to increase our customer base,” Christopher said. “We share customers with Mill Mountain, and I hear some of our customers talk about Starbucks, but a lot of customers say that we are better.”

Christopher said that Daily Grind sees between 100 and 150 customers on an average day.

“I’ve had a customer say that he wished we did well enough to see Starbucks pushed out,” Christopher said.

“We have seen fewer faces this year while we continue to see our regulars, we have not increased our clientele because there is stiff competition with all of the new coffee shops opening up,” said Scott Elich, owner of Mill Mountain Coffee and Tea.

Elich said Mill Mountain was the first coffee shop in Blacksburg, opening in 1991.

“We have been roasting our own coffee for 14 years and we try to keep our atmosphere welcoming and comfortable with the hanging of Blacksburg Regional Art Associations’ featured paintings,” Elich said.

“We are privately owned and been here since 1994,” said Miguel Harvey, manager and veteran employee of Bollo’s Coffee Shop.

Harvey said that compared to a couple of years ago, the opening of new coffee shops like Starbucks has affected the “to-go” crowd in the mornings.

“As school opens up every August, business improves, but because Blacksburg is so transient, a lot of clientele will disappear to other shops for unknown reasons,” Harvey said.

Harvey said Bollo’s gets a mix of customers because “we cater and bake our own goods.”

“On average, if I had to guesstimate, we see about 300 to 400 customers daily, on average,” Harvey said.

Harvey said that each coffee shop has their own niche, and Bollo’s is always changing and adapting to fit its customers’ preferences.

“We just started roasting our own coffee and we are pushing our full-time employees to learn as much knowledge about coffee as possible,” said Valerie Sutherland, general manager of the Easy Chair Coffee Shop.

Sutherland said coffee is the focus of the business, not sales.

“We have several full-time employees that are accredited and certified baristas and roasters,” Sutherland said.
Sutherland said Easy Chair Coffee Shop has worked and volunteered at the Specialty Coffee Association of America and the Barista and Roasters Guilds, both of which are chapters of the SCAA.

“Our business has done nothing but steadily increase, even after the opening of the Starbucks of University City Boulevard around a year and a half ago. We weren’t really affected,” Sutherland said.

When I think of Starbucks, I think of McDonald’s. Why? Starbucks’ mission is to serve the same coffee at every location in every country, continent, hemisphere; this is identical to McDonald’s eternal goal of offering the same hamburger patties, with the precise hints of processed flavors, the world over. When food chains desire to create an ultimate uniformity on this scale, there are several drawbacks, rather severe ramifications. Take a look at McDonald’s: they are now the nation’s largest buyer of meat and notice how their demand has horrifically altered the slaughterhouses and meat-packing plants in this nation. Starbucks is becoming a similar giant in the coffee industry. Buying coffee beans in enormous quantities at minimal prices continually changes the lives of coffee bean growers throughout the world (further, there are great environmental effects to this corporate demand that are difficult to minimize).

Should I even mention Starbucks’ stated business objective of becoming the premier provider of coffee in our world? This sounds strikingly equivalent to McDonald’s ubiquitous yellow arches. There are side effects to being ridiculously successful and gleaning up everyone’s coffee fix. So before you are once again allured by a fertility goddess and crave some frou frou frappuccino, check around for local alternatives and you may find a far better coffee environment and experience.

Contrary to the column “Local coffee should take precedence over Starbucks” (CT, Sept. 14), we pay premium prices to coffee farmers so they can make a profit and support their families. In 2004, this meant that Starbucks paid on average $1.20 per pound for its high-quality coffee beans — approximately double the commodity market’s price during the year.

Beyond paying premium prices, Starbucks also provides coffee farmers access to affordable credit, invests in social projects in coffee communities and provides technical assistance and agricultural expertise through the Starbucks Farmer Support Center in Costa Rica. In addition, Starbucks has developed a set of socially responsible coffee buying guidelines called C.A.F.E. (Coffee and Farmer Equity) Practices, designed to protect the environment, help ensure fair prices, wages and workers’ rights and promote social development in coffee communities.

Locally, we believe that our presence has benefited other coffee retailers by increasing foot traffic and raising consumer awareness of specialty coffee. As Starbucks has opened stores, a growing number of independent coffeehouses have also sprung up across the United States. As a result, consumers benefit as they are offered more choices, new jobs are created and neighborhoods are enriched with the addition of local gathering places.

Starbucks has achieved success one cup at a time, one store at a time. We started as a small business in Seattle’s Pike Place market more than 30 years ago. Since then, each one of our stores has become a unique part of its neighborhood. We firmly believe that there is room for choice in every community and that our customers and partners at each location give the store its own personality and atmosphere.

Starbucks is proud to be a part of the Blacksburg community and we welcome the opportunity to continue to serve the university and its community.

Despite these accomplishments, there is still a strong movement against Starbucks. One of the many examples can be found at American University, where President Benjamin Ladner decided that the coffee shop Pura Vida better represented “American University’s institutional values and another opportunity to translate those values into a demonstrated public responsibility.” 

The university allowed Pura Vida (and not Starbucks) to move into the Mary Graydon Student Center due to a strong student-led movement that favored it over Starbucks.

These students had good reason to oppose Starbucks. Starbucks proudly displays its “Corporate Social Responsibility 2004 Annual Report,” which asks an important question on the second page: “Is Starbucks responsible?” Despite the report’s 76 pages of bullet points, graphs and pictures displaying the company’s commitment to diversity, sustainability and a fun workplace, one simple fact cannot be hidden. Only 1.6 percent of Starbucks coffee is fair-trade certified. Despite the opportunities that the C.A.F.E. program can provide, in 2004 only 14.5 percent of Starbucks coffee actually met C.A.F.E. practices. Pura Vida, on the other hand, offers 100 percent fair trade coffee.

According to Starbucks, the lack of Fair Trade Coffee is due to a lack of supply. According to Global Exchange, only 20 percent of fair trade coffee is sold at fair trade prices — the rest is sold at the market price due to a lack of demand. In an open market where huge corporations like Nestle and Kraft have enormous market power as buyers and sellers living on cooperatives have practically no market power, prices are often set below production costs. This makes poverty a sad reality for many coffee farmers who rely on the land for their livelihood.

According to Make Trade Fair, in Vietnam’s Dak Lak Province, coffee is sold at 60 percent of production costs, while a glimpse at Starbucks’ website boasts of “Strong September and Fiscal Year 2005 revenues.” But this end result shouldn’t be surprising, says Make Trade Fair. When you buy a cup of coffee, 2 percent of the earnings go to the farmer, 3 percent to the exporter, while the great majority of the cash — 64 percent — goes to the roaster and 25 percent goes to the retailer.

Much of the products we use every day are built in sweatshops, much of the furniture we use on campus was built in a prison and much of the coffee we drink was grown under conditions that many would consider to be worse than a sweatshop. The stories of these workers are practically absent from advertisements, press releases and corporate social responsibility reports, except for the few workers who can actually provide uplifting stories to comfort consumers and help sell more product. Comments like “tell people in your place that the drink they are enjoying is now the cause of all our problems,” from Lawrence Seguya, a coffee farmer in Uganda, do little to promote a good image for coffee retailers.

Seguya, interviewed by Geoff Sayer from Oxfam International, said “Buyers can just set the price they want. Millers can just set the price they want. Exporters can just set the price they want … We buy the crop with our sweat and sell it for nothing.”

Fair-trade certified coffee, on the other hand, ensures that farmers are paid a living wage for their coffee. Coffee is a very important product in today’s economy, with numerous countries depending heavily on its export. The international economy privileges huge corporations with enormous market power, while small farmers compete for subsistence in a race to the bottom. The best way to help farmers is to pay a living wage, but Starbucks has not shown this necessary commitment. With less then 2 percent of Starbucks coffee being fair-trade certified, Starbucks is far from being socially responsible. The least students can do is to consider finding different coffee shops to spend their money.

Starbucks and the Fair Trade movement share common goals: to help ensure that farmers receive a fair price for their coffee so that they can improve their lives and strengthen their farms for the future. Starbucks purchased 4.8 million pounds of Fair Trade Certified coffee in 2004, and those purchases impacted more than 42,000 Fair Trade coffee farmers in nine countries around the world. Our commitment for 2005 is to double our purchases again — to 10 million pounds of Fair Trade Certified coffee. This will make Starbucks the largest purchaser of Fair Trade Certified coffee in North America.

While we support Fair Trade, we think students should understand that purchasing Fair Trade coffee is not the sole measure of social responsibility in coffee buying. The Fair Trade movement was designed to address only one sector of the coffee industry: small-scale farmers organized into cooperatives. The coops that are currently on the Fair Trade registry represent only 3 percent of the world’s coffee farmers. Global Exchange, the human rights organization and Fair Trade advocate, states on its Web site that Fair Trade “cannot address all of the social inequities associated with coffee production around the world,” because it leaves out larger farms and their workers.

In order to address issues of economic transparency, social conditions and environmental protection for coffee purchases from all types of farms, Starbucks developed buying guidelines, Coffee and Farmer Equity Practices (C.A.F.E. Practices), that encourage sustainability at all levels of the coffee supply chain. C.A.F.E. Practices applies to coops (including Fair Trade coops), small and large farms, as well as the mills and exporters who play a critical role in helping small-scale farmers bring their coffee to market. Such holistic guidelines go beyond paying premium prices. This is a new approach for the coffee industry and we are proud to lead it.

As the author pointed out, in 2004, the first year of C.A.F.E. Practices, 14.5 percent of our coffee was purchased under the guidelines established by C.A.F.E. Practices’ pilot program. While this may seem like a small start, it actually represented 43.5 million pounds of coffee and exceeded our target by 45 percent. We committed with publicly stated targets to increasing that percentage each year and our goal is to purchase the majority of our coffee under C.A.F.E. Practices by 2007.

Starbucks agrees with the author about the importance of paying fair prices for coffee—prices that enable farmers to make a profit. Our goal is to pay premium prices for all the coffee we buy, whether or not it is part of C.A.F.E. Practices or our Fair Trade purchases. In fiscal year 2004, as noted in our Corporate Social Responsibility Annual Report, we paid an average of $1.20 per pound for coffee, which was 74 percent higher than the commodity market’s price during the year. 

In addition, through 2005, Starbucks has made available more than $8.5 million in funding through nonprofit organizations that provide coffee farmers with access to affordable credit. This credit makes a critical difference to tens of thousands of farmers worldwide each year, allowing them to invest in their farms and hold their crops for sale when the price is best. Much of this credit benefits Fair Trade farmers, whether they are selling coffee to Starbucks or our competitors.

To further strengthen coffee communities, in fiscal year 2004, Starbucks supported 35 social development projects in nine countries, including building and renovating homes for coffee growing families in Columbia, a project that has benefited approximately 2,300 people since 1999.

Starbucks also provides agricultural expertise to farmers through our Farmer Support Center in Costa Rica. Through the Support Center, agronomists collaborate with coffee farmers to improve quality, implement conservation efforts and increase their profitability.

There is no question that there’s more work to be done to bring stability and equity to coffee farmers. We respect and applaud the efforts of Pura Vida and other companies that are working to make a difference in the lives of coffee farmers. But this is a complex issue that requires an integrated response, including, but not limited to, paying prices that allow farmers to make a profit. Fair Trade is one important component of buying coffee in a socially responsible manner, but not the complete solution — for Starbucks or coffee farmers.

On the American front, it is the local coffee shop owners and workers that fall slain against the seemingly unstoppable competition of the coffee giant. In Starbucks’ 2002 Annual Report, the company points out its current stateside situation.

“As a result of its expansion strategy of clustering stores in existing markets, Starbucks has experienced a certain level of cannibalization of sales of existing stores by new stores as store concentration has increased … However, management believes such cannibalization has been justified by incremental sales and return(s),“ it said in the Starbucks.com Annual Reports.

So, not only are they sure to firmly defeat local competition with their clustering, but they also force their own store owners to compete against the other Starbucks around the block and down the street and a few stories above them. This practice is horrendous and with over 4,500 operating locations, the effect shows no sign of diminishing. A corporate practice of pursuing effectual defeat of all competition stymies local diversity and, naturally, relieves us of our choice.

It’s difficult to work against a machine that has but one purpose, but there are ways to curtail the negative effects of this type of consummate dominance. Buy local. There are countless local coffee shops in the Blacksburg area and plenty of opportunities to make a statement against the progressive defeat of local coffee shops. Just 18 months ago, there were no Starbucks in this Virginia Tech community; now there are three, one being in Christiansburg. How many will there be another 18 months from now? Four? Seven? Will you start to notice a Starbucks perched right beside every BT stop? I hope not. Check out your coffee options; Blacksburg is full of them.