Tuesday, January 08, 2002


man-o-manischewitz, as mr. right likes to say! i'm honored to have d. cadmus stop on by!

check out the comment on sunday's post. i personally read cadmus' site almost every day. as far as his comments go, i agree with them in general. the fair trade people should not pick on specialty retailers. the specialty/boutique coffee people are more likely to themselves share the fair traders' views, as are their customers. but if you want to get anything done, at a certain point you have to stop quarrelling with each other and let bygones be bygones, in my very humble opinion.

of course the fair trade folks ain't picketing sara lee, kraft, nestle or their ilk. it's hopeless. those guys don't care and they have the political moxie to get themselves whatever they need so they can continue to pursue their goal of low-quality coffee at the cheapest price.

these firms appear to be too short-sighted to see that coffee consumption overall in the (right click this link and save the target file to your desktop, then open the spreadsheet in your favorite program) united states, united kingdom and other countries is down from a decade ago, and will stay down for a good while, not because green tea is a fad, or because coke is it, but because the poor-quality, stale, pre-ground coffee most people are used to drinking tastes terrible.

and who wants to drink low-quality, bad-tasting stuff? and yet this is what the largest corporations pawn off on the public. if people knew the starving conditions -- living conditions they sure ain't -- of many coffee workers, that would only make them even more unhappy with the stuff they think is coffee. this is why i urgently feel that massive consumer education and better advertising to help create demand is required. but this kind of united action can be taken only when the parties involved have stopped scoring grievances.

posted by fortune | 10:56 AM | top | link to this | email this: | | | 0 comments