Uncommon Grounds by Mark
Pendergrast, 1999, Excerpts
There are exporters, importers, and roasters. There are
frantic traders in the pits of the coffee exchanges. There are expert cuppers
and liquorers who spend their day slurping, savoring, and spitting coffee.
There are the retailers, the vending machine suppliers, the marketers, the
advertising copyrighters, the consultants.
Everyone in the coffee industry appears to envy everyone
else. Growers object to the brokers making a commission just by picking up the
phone to sell their beans to exporters. The brokers think the exporters have it
made, but exporters feel at the mercy of importers, who sell to rich Americans.
Importers, caught in savage price swings, fell pinched with a tiny profit
margin, but they think the roasters make millions. Roasters see retailers
doubling the price of their roasted beans, while coffee bars convert the beans
to expensive beverages. Yet the coffeehouse owner is working fifteen-hour days,
six days a week, fighting the health inspector and the Starbucks that just
opened down the street.
US tobacco giant Philip Morris owns 14 percent of the world
coffee market, Sara Lee bites off another 11 percent of the world market, and
Proctor and Gamble is 8 percent.
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