This is an actual shirt you can buy at Nordstrom’s for 85 bucks!. I suppose if you can spend $6 on a latte, what’s $85 for a shirt, right?
I’ll make you a deal. Go buy a white t-shirt for a couple of bucks, and I’ll throw my coffee at you from my car window. Should look about the same. I won’t even charge you for the coffee.
Starbucks takes a lot of heat as the symbol of “corporate coffee”, and some of it is entirely deserved, but at the same time they do really seem to be earnest about being more responsible as a corporation for their business decisions, and making more effort than a lot of other companies one could point to in doing beneficial things for their employees and for the “greater good”. This Fast Company story from a few weeks ago about the difficult decisions and choices the company invited upon itself in trying to legitimately address the issue of paper waste generated by all those damn cups is really a very interesting tale. I talked a little bit about “greenwashing” recently, and this article shows the difference between genuinely assuming a mantle of responsibility for an environmental issue and pulling bullshit PR stunts. It’s obvious that the “cup dilemma” has been a major PITA for the people involved, and exactly because Starbucks has plenty of critics scrutinizing its actions they have not been able to let themselves off the hook. Where they have drawn their limits, local groups have pursued action to make Starbucks even more accountable, and that keeps the pressure on to be real about the issue, and the company seems more willing to acknowledge its own shortcomings.
Well, okay not EVERYONE…just for people who go and vote tomorrow. But come on, kiddies, with the promise of a tall one and a stiff one, how could anyone over the legal voting age NOT take advantage of such an incredible deal?!?!?
And the sex toys come in both Republican AND Democrat flavors! There’s even a “Maverick Man Sleeve” for those of you who need a little “solitary confinement”. Unfortunately, while Obama, McCain and Palin are all memorialized in rubber, silicone and plastic for your erotic imagnings, there don’t seem to be any Joe Biden sex toys. Or maybe that’s a good thing…your call.
Or maybe you’d rather have ice cream. You sick pervert.
But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.
While the article is putatively aimed at the President-Elect-To-Be, what he describes is something we all need to pay attention to.
The obvious solution, thus, is to make your own hard cider from apples you press yourself. I remember going to an apple farm in New Hampshire many years ago with our friends Tony and Sharon and squeezing our own cider from an old-fashioned apple press (which we then brought home and let ferment), but that was messy and labor-intensive. This Instructables.com article tells you how to make hard cider using homebrew equipment and champagne yeast. It’s still a slightly different beast from the natural fermentation, since you do actually pasteurize the apple juice before adding the yeast, but results in something a bit more potent than what you can buy at the store.
As I alluded to yesterday, my busy schedule of tech support house calls this week has given me more than the usual amount of opportunity to spend time in some of the many Starbucks locations that dot the Greater Boston landscape. Consequently, I wound up trying one of the latest comers in their never-ending parade of lame breakfast sandwiches, the sausage, egg and cheese “piadini”. The name comes from an Italian flatbread called piadina, which is essentially the same thing as a flour tortilla. Piadina is used as a basic wrap for all manner of fillings, not merely breakfast, and is even eaten plain as daily bread. The Starbucks “piadini” is more like a rustic tart, made with pastry dough folded into a rough square. They offer the sausage-egg-cheese filling and a spinach-feta-ricotta filling. Like all their other previous attempts at breakfast sandwiches, these are pre-baked elsewhere and just re-heated in their fancy-schmancy turbo ovens.
Even though their turbo oven is supposed to make things nice and toasty, this sucker was like half-cooked pie dough when I got it — not firm enough to retain its shape when picked up, so that it sort of drooped on my fingers like Silly Putty, but just firm enough to start to crumble when I tried to fold it up a bit. It was also almost completely devoid of any discernible flavor. The coup de grace, though, was that it had just enough grease from the sausage and melted Cheddar cheese to drip onto my shirt, necessitating a trip home to change before going to my first appointment. Eminently skippable. I remain solid in my preference for the McDonalds’ sausage burrito as the drive-thru breakfast sandwich of choice.
Last week was as un-busy as this one has been overloaded, so I actually had time to do a leisurely grocery shopping one day and came across a new variation of Splenda with added fiber. The fiber is corn starch that adds a gram of soluble fiber to each packet of Splenda. I use two packets every day in my morning coffee, so it seemed like an easy way to add a little extra fiber to my daily diet. The recommended daily amount of fiber for an adult is 20-35 grams, and most Americans only consume about half of that, so I figure it couldn’t hurt. The corn starch is non-caloric, so there’s no overhead in that respect. It doesn’t affect the sweetening property of the sucralose, either. My only negative observation is that “soluble” seems to be a bit relative, as I have noticed undissolved white residue in the bottom of my coffee mugs when I wash them out, and I have never noticed this with original Splenda. I would give this particular product a thumbs-up.
We are completely ga-ga for this new beverage called Fruit-A-Peel. It’s a fruit-juice-based soda, but it’s mostly soda water rather than mostly juice, so it’s much lower in calories and carbs than ordinary sodas. An entire 1-liter bottle (as shown in the photo) has fewer calories and fewer grams of carbohydrates than a 12-ounce can of regular soda. It comes in a bunch of different flavors, too: grape, lemon, pomegranate, apple, cranberry and blackberry. Bridget and I agree that grape is the best flavor of the whole lot, but I also really like the apple and pomegranate flavors. The cranberry and lemon are probably the weakest of the six. I bought these on a whim one day back during the summer, and since then this has almost completely replaced all other carbonated beverages consumed in our household. It has no artificial sweeteners in it at all, so it’s not non-caloric, but it also isn’t just a mix of flavor chemicals either.
The product is made by Polar Beverages, which is a company based in Worcester, MA. Distribution of Polar’s products is almost completely limited to New England, though you can get it in parts of upstate New York and some places in the NYC metro area.
This post comes to you from the Starbucks on Memorial Drive in Cambridge where I’m killing an hour in between clients and trying out the WordPress iPhone app. Typing one-fingered isn’t the speediest, but it’s not too bad. This could be pretty useful for blogging on the road.
Now I need to get into the habit of saving all the links I find to del.icio.us or some similar site so I can post something worthwhile instead of this sort of blather. I never was all that into del.icio.us, but having embraced web apps for other tasks, I guess I need to get over it.
Oh, sure, closing 600 stores will undoubtedly save some money, and selling smoothies…oh, sorry, the Vivanno will draw in some new customers (anybody try one yet?), but it’s good old fashioned street marketing like this that’s really going to save their turbo-cooked bacon.
I’ve posted a couple of times about the “Nintendo Fan Network” wireless system that Nintendo tested out last year at Safeco Field in Seattle and also a similar system being tested at DisneyWorld in Florida.
Today, Engadget reports that Safeco Field will offer the service for free this season. Previously, there was a $5.00 fee to use the service; given how much everything else costs at a professional sporting event, it’s pretty amazing that they’ve eliminated the charge instead of jacking it up to $15-20, but, as Chris Anderson wrote in Wired a couple of months ago, in the end anyone providing these kind of services will find themselves giving away the service in order to make money on the extras (the old “give away the razor, make the money on the blades” theory that has served Gillette so well for decades).
To wit: a few weeks ago none other than the mighty Starbucks itself said that they would stop charging for WiFi (sort of), after soaking people for $6 a whack for several years. The service has been spotted in the wild in at least one city, and will take them the rest of 2008 to roll out to every store. In cities like New York, which seem to have a Starbucks every 100 fet, this is as good as having municipal WiFi. I hope they hit the Boston stores soon, because Boston’s own municipal WiFi has more or less gone tits-up.
I am very relieved to report that the nasty queasiness that drinking hot coffee was causing me a couple of weeks ago has retreated along with 99% of the other effects from the flu. I’ve been a committed coffee drinker for so long that the prospect of saying sayonara to a key part of my morning routine was almost too bleak to face.
I didn’t suffer the lack of caffeine as much as you might think because I still managed to have a diet cola or two during the course of a typical day — always after 10:30 a.m., mind you, like civilized people. My work day is typically quite slow, especially in the morning, so it was possible to plod along without having to resort to senseless violence most days. And I kept testing the waters to see if my digestive system was showing signs of being amenable to coffee; an iced coffee here or there, a “cappucino” from the coffee machine at work, a small cuppa from Starbucks. By the middle of last week, it was clear that the effect had been temporary.
Yesterday I even made a special trip to Starbucks to try their new “everyday” coffee blend “Pike Place Roast”. Granted, I’ve been off my feet coffee-wise for a bit, but I have to tell you I thought it was terrible. No flavor to it at all. This is exactly the kind of coffee I will go out of my way to avoid. The Starbucks people say that they devised this blend to counter the criticisms they get about their coffee tasting “burnt”, but I suspect the people who complain about that are just people who don’t really like coffee in the first place or whose entire sensibility about coffee has been shaped by years of drinking instant.
I did decide to go with the flow and make the annual switch to iced coffee take hold a few weeks earlier than usual. I need to buy some good fresh beans and make up a pot so I don’t have to go to Dunkin’ Donuts every day. I use a drip maker to make my iced coffee at home. The coffee from my press pot is a bit too sludgy for good iced coffee. I’m also considering going half-caf in light of the lack of serious withdrawal. Gotta have some caffeine, after all. Just the other day the media all had a story about how caffeine protects your brain from dementia. I’m demented enough as it is.
I guess the gang at Starbucks are serious about trying to make up for some weak numbers. They’ve finally figured out that charging people nine bucks an hour to use their in-store Wi-Fi wasn’t exactly keeping all those coffee-drinking web surfers hanging around in their stores to buy the crappy breakfast sandwiches and stale pastries. Ars Technica says that Starbucks is dumping T-Mobile in favor of using AT&T as their Wifi provider.
People who already have AT&T as their ISP will get unlimited access for free. And if you’re not an AT&T broadband customer, just flashing a Starbucks pre-paid coffee card will get you two hours for free (and let’s face it, if you need to spend more than two hours online at a Starbucks, you probably need a job a lot more than the free WiFi). The hoi polloi will still have to pay, but only $3.99/hour, which is less than buying a Venti Pumpkin Spice Latte with two extra shots anyway.
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