14 January 2013

Rape of Syria




Syria conflict causing 'staggering' humanitarian crisis
14 Jan 2013
With more then 600,000 Syrians having fled the country, the International Rescue Committee is calling on the outside world to step up its response. The US-based group describes the level of rape and sexual violence occurring in the conflict as "horrific".

Women and girls under attack
Jan 2013
After decades of working in war and disaster zones, the IRC knows that women and girls suffer physical and sexual violence in every conflict. Syria is no exception. Rape is a significant and disturbing feature of the Syrian civil war. In the course of three IRC assessments in Lebanon and Jordan, sexual violence was consistently identified by Syrian women, men and community leaders as a primary reason their families fled the country. “We surrendered to the reality of rape,” said a Syrian refugee in Lebanon, remarking on the severity of rape in this crisis.

Many women and girls relayed accounts of being attacked in public or in their homes, primarily by armed men. These rapes, sometimes by multiple perpetrators, often occur in front of family members. The IRC was told of attacks in which women and young girls were kidnapped, raped, tortured and killed. Roadblocks, prolific throughout Syria, have become especially perilous for women and girls. The IRC’s women’s protection team in Lebanon was told of a young girl who was gang-raped and forced to stagger home naked—heightening her shame in a society where modesty is so valued.

Because of the stigma and social norms around the “dishonor” that rape brings to women and girls and their families, Syrian survivors rarely report sexual violence. Many of those interviewed by the IRC said women and girl survivors also fear retribution by assailants. Others are afraid of being killed by family members if they report incidents, since a raped woman or girl is thought to bring shame to a family.

The fear of rape is so significant that many families are marrying off their daughters to “protect” them from rape. Others revert to early marriage if their daughters have been sexually assaulted “to safeguard their honor.” In one extreme case, the IRC was told of a father who shot his daughter when an armed group approached to prevent the “disgrace” of her being raped.


Syrian Fertility Goddess


13 January 2013

The 'Anti-Starbucks' Starbucks




The 'Anti-Starbucks' Starbucks by Jim Hightower
12 Aug 2009

With Starbucks' sales declining as more and more caffeine consumers reject the cookie-cutter corporate climate that the chain epitomizes, it is launching a new line of stores that disappears its name. There's no corporate signage on the new buildings, no logo stamped on every product inside and none of the generically bland ambience that makes one Starbucks just like the other 16,000 in the chain.

Instead, the new shops strive to be the anti-Starbucks, dressing up as funky neighborhood coffeehouses with a cool, local vibe. A sort of rustic, thrift-shop decor screens the corporate presence, and such additions as live music and poetry readings are meant to lend an aura of down-home authenticity.

The first of these faux local outlets opened last month in Seattle under the nom de commerce of "15th Avenue Coffee and Tea," taken from the name of its neighborhood. Future stores are also expected to appropriate the names of their neighborhoods all across the country in a corporate effort to convey a sense of belonging. The idea, as explained by the chain's senior vice president of global design, is to give each of the coffeehouses "a community personality."

What we have here, of course, is a willful attempt to commit consumer fraud. But it's such a goofy fraud that it's doomed to be an embarrassing failure. Corporate chains can't do "community," can't do "funky," can't do "cool," can't do "independent" — because they're not. They're not any of those things. Starbucks is what it is. The corporate nature will always come out.


12 January 2013

Starbucks History




Uncommon Grounds by Mark Pendergrast, 1999, Excerpts

Many of the disaffected baby boomers had hitchhiked through Europe or were stationed there while serving in the military, and they had discovered the joys of espresso, fine foods, specialty coffee shops, and the cafe. With heightened international tastes, they were also searching for community, for grassroots verities. They found them in aromatic fresh-roasted whole beans, tumbling from small roasters. Many had been directly inspired by a pilgrimage to Berkeley to inhale the atmosphere at Peet’s.

Jerry Baldwin, Gordon Bowker, and Zev Siegl started a small, quality roasting business in Seattle. With a bare-breasted, twin-tailed mermaid as a logo, Starbucks opened on March 30, 1971, and was an immediate hit, selling primarily whole beans and supplies.

By 1980 the specialty coffee was entrenched in the big cities on the East and West coasts of the United States and reaching further into the heartland. Specialty coffee proved to be the perfect drink for the go-go 1980s, which witnessed the triumph of yuppies – young urban professionals – willing to pay top dollar for life’s luxuries.

In March 1987, Howard Schultz bought Starbucks which lost $330,000 in 1987. It appeared that another business cycle was beginning. Just as the traditional coffee industry had gone through fragmented growth and merger, the specialty coffee movement would also consolidate. In the process, would it also lose its soul?

In 1990 the company turned the corner, building a new roasting plant and showing a small profit. Shultz began to hire MBAs and corporate executives with experience running chain franchises, creating complex computer systems, and training employees nationwide to deliver standardized consumer goods. He recruited many of them in the early 1990s from fast-food companies such as KFC, Wendy’s McDonald’s, Burger King, Pepsi, and Taco Bell, and they brought professional management to the preexisting coffee idealism – though the two did not always coexist comfortably. By the end of 1991, there were just over one hundred stores with $57 million in sales, and Schultz was preparing to take Starbucks public in order to finance even more rapid expansion. On June 26, 1992, Starbucks launched its initial public offering [IPO], going public at $17 a share with a market capitalization of $273 million. Howard Schultz had paid less than $4 million for the company only five years earlier. Within three months, the stock price had reached $33, making Starbucks worth $420 million.

A darker aspect to this coffee surge was that many yuppies were recovering cocaine addicts by the early 1990s, and they turned to maximum-strength coffee as an alternative recreational drug that they could take along with their antidepressants, antipsychotics, and other prescriptions. These aging baby boomers had come full circle, back to the drink of their parents, after a childhood of Cokes and coming-of-age with cocaine. The television show “Frasier” placed the pretentious psychologist in Seattle, where he and his friends drink cappuccinos at the Cafe Nervosa.

The chain paid slightly above minimum wage – better than most fast-food companies – and provided an innovative benefits package that included part-time employees who worked twenty hours a week or more. As a result, employee turnover at Starbucks was only 60 percent a year, compared to the industry standard of 200 percent of more.

In 1989 the sociologist Ray Oldenburg published The Great, Good Place, a lament over the passing of community meeting places like the old country store of soda fountain. Schultz loved the book and adopted Oldenburg’s academic term, christening Starbucks as a “third place” beyond home or work, “an extension of people’s front porch,” where people could gather informally. Modern coffeehouses such as Starbucks do arguably provide a much-needed space for friends and strangers to meet, especially as our cultural ethos becomes more paranoid and fragmented.

Shultz, however, was not in business primarily to provide community. He was in it to win. Starbucks mounted a blitzkrieg across the country following the initial public offering, growing to 165 stores in 1992, 272 by 1993, and 425 in 1994. By mid-decade, the company was opening an average of a store every business day, targeting appropriate locations by studying the demographics of mail-order customers. Though Schultz could have quadrupled his rate of expansion by franchising Starbucks, he chose to open only company-owned stores, except in airports or other odd spots the demanded licensure. This way he could maintain strict control over quality and training.

Starbucks became a household word without mounting a national advertising campaign. Indeed, the company spent less than $10 million on advertising in its first twenty–five years. It was a veritable “word-of-mouth wonder,” as a stunned Advertising Age reporter put it.

Starbuck’s overwhelming success, with its aggressive tactics, inevitably brought criticism along with adulation. Specialty competitors complained that Starbucks used predatory retail tactics, frequently opening outlets directly across the street from their stores. Defensive Starbucks executives denied they were targeting competitors. 





11 January 2013

Coffee Production and Consumption




Uncommon Grounds by Mark Pendergrast, 1999, Excerpts

With 28-pound annual per-capita consumption, the Finns drink more coffee than anyone in the world. The United States, which bought half the world’s coffee just after WWII, now consumes about 20 percent, with a united Germany close behind. Japan now accounts for 11 percent of worldwide coffee sales, and the Japanese appreciate high quality, buying some of the world’s best beans.

World consumption – people spend approximately $80 billion annually for coffee in all forms – is growing only at a modest rate as we enter a new century. The steady decline in the United States has been arrested by the specialty revolution, but per capita intake remains static at around 10 pounds per year. Specialty coffee now accounts for approximately 20 percent of US home coffee consumption. Even the big roasters have improved the quality of their blends, with Arabica content growing. For years, northern Europeans set the standard for coffee quality while the mass market barbarians in the United Stares drank coffee swill.

By 2000, world coffee production and consumption should exceed one hundred million bags a year. With more sophisticate machinery, mechanize harvesting will become somewhat more common, but hand picking will still predominate. Even with new science and technology, however, the coffee industry will remain essentially unchanged. The boom-bust cycle will continue to send prices reeling up and down, exacerbated by frosts, droughts, speculative hedge funds, and the major roasters’ just-in-time inventory practices, which leave them more vulnerable to shortages. The worldwide trend toward higher-quality coffee, for which consumers are willing to pay premium prices, gives some grounds for hope that small farmers and laborers may someday break out of poverty, though that day is certainly far in the future.


10 January 2013

Coffee Industry Overview




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.