PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Starbucks hopes customers will be willing to pay at least $5 more when they stop in for their morning cup of Joe.
Starting Nov. 1, Starbucks will begin collecting donations of $5 or more from customers to stimulate U.S. job growth through its “Jobs for USA” program. The Seattle-based coffee chain is collaborating with the Opportunity Finance Network, a nonprofit that works with nearly 200 community development financial institutions to provide loans to small businesses and community groups. Starbucks says 100 percent of the donations will go toward loans for firms and organizations that can add jobs or stem job losses.
Starbucks, which pioneered how Americans drink coffee, declined to estimate how much money it plans to raise, but millions of people visit its nearly 7,000 company-owned U.S. stores each day. Customers who give will get a red, white and blue wristband that says “Indivisible.”
“This is about using Starbuck’s scale for good,” said Howard Schultz, Starbucks Corp.’s CEO.
Trust them….Starbucks is going to take your donation, give it to a collection of banks who will then loan it to small business. Sounds like a great scam.
Well, if there’s anywhere that people have extra money to give away, it should be Starbucks since they charge 4X what coffee should cost, and then they burn it!
One popular idea is to use the money to pay down billionaire taxes.
A tax break for the ‘job creators’ so that they will have something left over and be inclined to hire people. Make sense?
I have not been in a starbuks for about six years. the coffee sucks, and the whole vibe is cult like. Not unlike Apple.
Nice nom de flame. Thank you.
I used to go to Pete’s all the time and Starbucks when required. Never had coffee in these places. Always cappuccino. I have to admit, both of them make better cap than I do at home even though I roast my own green beans, etc. Must be the bean? The very precise roasting? Something I’m not getting.
Oh, I forgot===its my cheap machine. I think the pressure and temp varies too much for good creama production. It makes a good cup of coffee but bad espresso.
A nice issue to obsess over. Always happy I find “good enough” in most things.
OMG :O
That’s terrible. I can’t believe anyone still doesn’t use a $3000 imported coffee machine. You have to grind the beans at home or it just won’t be good enough, so you might need a separate grinder as well – can’t trust the ones in those integrated coffee machines.
Don’t forget the fair trade coffee beans – anything less is murder.
OMG–I used a spin type grinder but broke down and got a burr grinder for “uniform” size grind. Too cheap once again, my Mr Coffee Coffee Mill is no better than my spice grinder. Going to the espresso websites, the general opinion is you can’t get a decent grinder for less than about $500.====HAH!!!! But thats what makes it all fun: “How cheaply can I get this done?”
Using my variable grinders and the same roasted batch of beans, I do get variable results from just ok to sometimes terriffic espresso. Can’t tell if its the grind or the tamp===and once again, I forget my cheap $75 machine. I measure the liquid temp at the pump outlet and it varies from 195 (required) to 170 degrees (no good). For some reason, I just don’t want to invest that $3000 dollars when a French Press does a 90% job 90% of the time===but its not espresso.
Fun how we waste our time. Anyone have opinion on the shape of the puck?
4X? Try 10X. I did the economics on a cup of regular coffee from Starbucks a few years ago, and a regular cup of coffee (made at home) cost somewhere between $.10-.15. Prices have gone up a bit on some of the components since, but still, it shouldn’t be more than $.20-.25 for a VENTI cup of regular coffee. All the rest is Starbucks’ overhead and profit. They started paying their waitstaff….er, “baristas” $8/hr when minimum wage was still around $5.35/hr. And when you bring in their “premium” drinks….fuhgeddaboudit.
When will people finally wake up to the fact that ‘trickle down’ does not and has never worked. The ONLY thing that does is ‘trickle up’, but of course we’ll never see that because the rich don’t want to wait to take their cut.
This will offset the $5 fee banks are charging because liberals wanted to cut down on debit cards fees at the request of WalMart.
Isn’t this the same plan the government has been using for years?
Donations to charity is good.
But but but
Passing your donation through a donation-bundling corporation just gives that corporation a tax write-off at your expense — you should have taken the tax write-off yourself by giving directly to charities.
Furthermore the corporate influence and power is too high as it is without people helping. When a corporation bundles so-and-so amounts of tax writeoffs to policymakers, that corporation is demonstrating its “goodness” to our government, and it expects tit-for-tat from our government policymakers in return.
Citizen, retain your voice in this government. Don’t give your voice away for free, or worse than free, to the corporate charity/voice bundlers.
If I want to loan money to small corporations at zero interest, just shoot me.
They aren’t loaning at zero interest, but YOU are, so guess who keeps the difference.
I’ll buy a bond if I want to loan some money. I will collect the interest on the bond for my kids. I won’t donate the interest earned on my money to some corporation.
Thank you very much ya greedy dumbass Starbucks.
I visited the OFN’s web site and they sound pretty good to me. They finance small town small businesses overlooked by the major banks. I wonder how they stand on angel investing? Here’s their “about” http://opportunityfinance.net/about/
Love the redesign!
Coffee is subjective. Caribou is better than Starbucks by a mile.
Generic instant fro a “teabag” boiled on a Coleman stove deep in the woods on a cold morning camping is delicious. 😉
Trickle down never really worked for Reagan either.
It didn’t work for Shrub and there are structural causes why itcan’t work.
After a certain amount, you have to get accountants.
These accountants are duty bound to sit on that pile of cash and on those assets and invest them, not for the greater good, for the betterment of the pile of cash and those assets.
The Chinese dynasties suffered fatally from their eunuchs because the very eunuchs who were charged with China’s administration actually weakened the empire through their skillful manipulation.
And the Chinese were not alone…
It lasted until his son Czar Nicholas II abdicated in 1917, and then he and the rest of the imperial family was taken out and shot and all of the property of the rich and of the church was seized.
There is a lesson here for the thieves of Wall Street.
What starts out as a relatively harmless parade of the lost and the malcontent can easily become deadly and much more devastating.
you provided part of the reason trickle down DOES work in your own whiny complaint: “….and invest them.”
you really are an idiot, aren’t you?
What a horrible, horrible idea. My tips are already stimulating the directly economy, by making up for the minimum wage Starbucks (and other establishments) pay to their struggling barristas. The only effect I see this having is a diversion of that money to some faceless non-profit with a useless management layer, siphoning a huge percentage off the top along the way. I imagine a lot of shops will try to hide it when the boss isn’t looking. I hope so, anyway!
“Directly stimulating the economy,” I mean. Sorry.
Why am I surprised no one here knows anything about Howard Schultz?
JCD, it looks like your new format allows bots.