How much is that latte in the window?

Many of us think of Seattle as a northern San Francisco, a place of leftist-leaning, politically-correct flakes, more likely than the average American to be vegetarian and bicycle-riding, who think of themselves as living as close to Nirvana as any Americans can.


But Seattle also gave us Starbucks, a large chain of coffee shops which has become synonymous with obsequiousness. [Well, they claim to sell coffee, but as far as I can tell they don’t sell much coffee. The sell beverages with a minimum of coffee, mixed with enough creams, mints, herbs, syrups, and oils to make one almost unaware of the coffee content.]

For most of its history, Starbucks has been very profitable and has expanded onto what seems every street corner of the country, at least in downtown, suburban, and affluent urban neighborhoods and downtowns. Fortunately their kind of business has made only minor inroads on our East Side and some of what has come has been more locally-based.

Accounting is a funny science. Not only does it require a knowledge of some really arcane mathematical techniques, but it only takes into account money. Everything has to come down to dollars and cents [or yen and sen or rubles and kopecks and euros or pounds or whatever system one is using.]

I suspect that many of the people who patronize these alleged coffee shops would agree that we do not [and probably cannot] properly factor environmental or social costs into how we evaluate costs and opportunities. Some probably hold great contempt for how Walmartized we have become and, whenever they see an article about the chain, maybe even snort contempt at the crackers and rubes whose patronage made Walmart big. They may be reading this on computers made by Chinese child slaves, but they do not connect the dots and understand that abusing labor makes some companies more profitable than can really be justified.

Well, Minnesota Independent writer Paul Demko [formerly of City Pages] has brought back to attention the ongoing case between the Starbucks Workers Union and Starbucks’ Minnesota operations. I wonder how many people sitting in one of those establishments reading about this on their wi-fi computers will notice this and just keep on clicking.

I am not trying to be especially hard on Starbucks or their clientele, even though the company offers a completely unnecessary product. We all have to make our own judgments on how we do our personal reconciliation between total accounting which includes all costs and benefits and money accounting and we all do it differently and some of us may even feel a bit regretful about some of our decisions.

For example, I would feel a lot better if I could write this on a computer which was not made in a third world sweatshop, but I don’t believe such a thing even exists. And my slave- or child- [or both-] made computer is running partly on energy derived from radioactive power plants and partly on energy made at other plants which operate on underpriced fossil fuel.

There is no law against adults drinking lattes [whatever they may be] and there shouldn’t be. After all, free people need to be free to make free decisions.

But maybe those who consume the stuff might want to open their eyes a bit.