. . . State that is, not District of Columbia.
Start with Howard Schultz, Democrat running for president. Very rich Democrat.
Schultz took the advice of H.L. Mencken who said that no one ever went bust underestimating the taste of the American public. He sold crappy coffee-flavored drinks to people who don't even like coffee.
Just another American success story. But Schultz is either a phony or a crook. In 2013 Starbucks was one of many companies that had to pay a settlement to Kona coffee farmers for selling mislabeled coffee.
Kona coffee costs 10 times what the cheap stuff does. Starbucks' customers don't have a clue about what the differences it, so it was easy peasy. Capitalism in all its shiny glory. Wall Street loves Howard Schultz perhaps more than any other capitalist.
Starbucks legal defense was that is it actually bought Kona coffee.
The problem with this defense was that growers in Kona produce 2,000,000 pounds of coffee a year and the defendants were selling 20,000,000 pounds a year.
So Schultz either cannot tell the difference between Kona coffee and the cheapest Central American coffee or is a crook. Take your pick.
The settlement was an American success story, too. The crooked retailers included Costco, Amazon and Walmart among others beside Starbucks. They were selling 20 million pounds of fake coffee at $20 a pound for years and settled the lawsuit for $1 million.
Dr. Evil should do so well.
(Just this month a new lawsuit was filed alleging misbranding of Kona coffee. This one has not yet been adjudicated but some of the big firms in the previous lawsuit are named in this one. Not Starbucks, though. So maybe Starbucks learned something.)
Another Washingtonian running as a Democrat for president is Jay Inslee, once the governor. He's a single-issue candidate and his issue is that we are the last generation that can do something about climate change.
There's another player besides us in that game though. Inslee seems to think the usual or natural climate of Washington state is what we have seen over the last couple hundred years. This is as strange a belief as Howard Schultz's belief that there are 20,000,000 pounds of Kona coffee in the world.
The usual condition for Washington State over the past several million years has been that the western part of it has been buried under a mile of ice while the eastern part has been repeatedly flooded by the collapse of ice dams -- possibly a mile high -- on Lake Missoula.
Anybody who's been to eastern Washington can see the results -- the famous scablands.
RTO is all for cleaning up environmental insults, unlike the Republican policy which is to keep wallowing in our own filth. However, climate change really is coming and it really will be devastating, though there's little hope that we can put enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to prevent it.
Harry wrote: "So Schultz either cannot tell the difference between Kona coffee and the cheapest Central American coffee or is a crook."
ReplyDeleteSo you think that the CEO of a company with over 200,000 employees was personally involved in purchasing coffee directly from growers?
I rather doubt that.
I know of a guy in the Imperial Valley here in Southern California who grows 100 acres a year of organic broccoli and 2000 acres a year of non-organic broccoli. The organic and non-organic broccoli are indistinguishable (sight, texture, taste and chemical analysis). He sells 2000 acres worth of organic broccoli (at a premium of course) and a mere 100 acres of non-organic broccoli. Some of that makes its way to Whole Foods as organic broccoli. Some of it is organic broccoli and some of it clearly isn't. But nobody can tell the difference. He is bamboozling broccoli buyers. But not directly. There are a number of distributors/middlemen between him and the Whole Foods Buyers. And of course there are quite a few layers between the Whole Foods buyers and the Whole Foods upper management. So to say that the Whole Foods upper management are crooks or can't tell the difference between broccoli grown by different methods is quite a stretch in my opinion.
I suspect the Kona coffee thing and Schultz is a similar stretch.
I didn't make up the argument that Schultz's lawyers made. Even after it was demonstrated to the satisfaction of the court that much more Kona was being sold than existed, Starbucks continued to affirm that it had sold only the genuine.
ReplyDeleteIf Schultz didn't know, then he should surrender his stock as having been obtained under false pretenses of competence.
If CEOs are going to be praised for their (largely phony) genius, they need to be held accountable for their (frequently real) stupidities and/or crimes.
I ain't blaming the baristas.
Your parable of the broccolis does make the useful point, which I have made many times, that unregulated businesses cheat.
"...unregulated businesses cheat..."
ReplyDeleteAs do regulated businesses and governments, only worse (bribes, graft, black markets, etc.)
Bottom line is that people cheat.
They cheat less -- or at least sometimes pay a price -- when they are regulated.
ReplyDeleteThe prime example is life insurance, an insignificant and corrupt business until government interceded, which resulted in a gigantic and very profitable business sector, not to mention an accumulation of capital such as the world had never seen.
ReplyDelete