Poor Farmer

By Leslie Patton & Sapna Maheshwari Bloomberg March 15, 2013 Caribou Coffee Co. will no longer pursue plans to open shops inside J.C. Penney Co. (JCP) stores, about six months after Chief Executive Officer Ron Johnson cited the company as a potential partner. The Minneapolis-based coffee seller won’t be opening stores in J.C. Penney locations and “does not have plans to move forward with a partnership at this time,” Caribou Chief Executive Officer Mike Tattersfield said in an e-mailed statement today. Johnson discussed the cafes during a September tour of a prototype store for analysts and investors. Tattersfield declined to say why Caribou was pulling out. The loss of the cafes comes as Johnson struggles to transform most of J.C. Penney’s stores into collections of boutiques peppered with eateries, or a kind of mall within a mall. The department store chain reported an annual sales decline of 25 percent to $13 billion about two weeks ago. In September it sai...

The New York Times March 16, 2013 IN 2005, Kenneth Lander, a lawyer in Monroe, Ga., moved with his wife, stepdaughter and the youngest three of his seven children to a coffee farm in San Rafael de Abangares, Costa Rica. He always “had a heart,” he said, for Latin America, and after a vacation to the lush cloud forests near Monteverde in 2004, he was determined to return on a more permanent basis. He was also looking for more balance in his work-driven life. And so, after buying a coffee farm from a farmer he’d met on his earlier trip, he packed up his life and moved. “It was like Swiss Family Robinson,” Mr. Lander jokes. “We just left.” In Costa Rica, Mr. Lander, who is now 46, didn’t have to worry about making money. He had received a cash windfall from selling a portion of a residential subdivision he had helped develop in Georgia; the plan was to keep selling more lots and live off the proceeds. So he grew coffee for fun. Then, in 2008, the financial cri...