Poor Farmer

“The retailer brags about supporting global clean-water projects - it donates 5 cents for every bottle of its Ethos water sold - but it quietly helped kill an expansion of the nickel-per-bottle deposit law right here in New York. Starbucks sells Ethos for $1.80 per 23.6-ounce bottle. Starbucks, however, donates less than 3 percent of the purchase price, while using huge amounts of fossil fuel to create and ship Ethos bottles.” – New York Post By CATHERINE CURAN New York Post April 1, 2007 Java giant Starbucks this weekend is fending off criticism that it is serving up cupfulls of hypocrisy along with its popular coffee. The retailer brags about supporting global clean-water projects - it donates 5 cents for every bottle of its Ethos water sold - but it quietly helped kill an expansion of the nickel-per-bottle deposit law right here in New York. The result of the unexpanded bottle bill is millions of plastic water bottles filling landfills, littering the streets and harming marine life,...

By Melissa Allison Seattle Times April 1, 2007 Jim Donald rarely slows down. Starbucks' chief executive thinks fast, talks fast and moves fast — all good qualities for the person in charge of making sure Seattle's best-known coffee-shop chain opens six or seven new stores a day. After two years on the job, the former grocery-store executive says Starbucks has a faster pace than his previous companies. He spends nearly half his time traveling, but that doesn't keep him from running and playing basketball and sending tens of thousands of hand-signed notes to employees each year. In an interview the day after Starbucks' annual meeting last month, Donald, 52, talked about Starbucks' international growth and his role at a company that has gotten negative attention lately. With a hint of a Southern accent that might come from Tampa, where he grew up, Donald conveyed both urgency and sincerity about keeping Starbucks' original character even as it aims for 40,000 store...