Closing of 16 Starbucks - safety Concerns

[Josh]

I’ve seen the no-union position in the same section as the section that disallows joining secret societies, so I wonder if the thinking was more along that line. The two have a lot in common: a club you join to improve your social standing. They have demands of loyalty. They use language like brothers and brotherhood, which would not be welcome for Mennonites. And they’ve both declined quite a bit over the last century.

Yes, membership in a "brotherhood" that is not the church is another reason.

[Josh]

I don't fully understand the religious objection to unions..

I’ve seen the no-union position in the same section as the section that disallows joining secret societies ... The two have a lot in common ... They use language like brothers and brotherhood, which would not be welcome for Mennonites.

Maybe in the distant past ... About the only contact I ever had with teaching unions was during the annual elections for building representatives. ... The negotiated things like health and retirement benefits ... Which I actually didn't really care about

[Emphasis mine]

They provided personal liability insurance for teachers and lobbied the state legislature on education issues that affected teachers. But that was about it.

Providing insurance would be another reason many plain people would avoid membership in something.

[Valerie]

We have 2 in my town very safe. They're all over NE Ohio- popular gift card for people to give as gifts (since we stock them at work i see popularity)
I've given as gifts to nieces & daughter who like the seasonal specialty drinks and/or because they travel.

If you have gift cards, & dont want to drink their coffee, you can purchase their bags of coffee.

[ohio jones]

Sales reps sometimes give me Starbucks gift cards, and I have trouble using them because the closest locations are inside big box stores and often aren't open when I do my shopping. And drinking coffee while pushing a shopping cart is a safety concern. The turnpike locations seem to not honor gift cards, telling me it's expired even though it says "no expiration date" on the card . That leaves airports, but I usually have access to a lounge with a fancy machine that makes coffee (sometimes even Starbucks brand) at no extra charge.

You and I must be members at different lounges; the ones I attend usually have an "Out of order" sign on their Illy machine.

I can access all the networks except the AAdmirals, and the UCs do seem to be the bottom of the barrel these days. CLE is one of the better locations, but I still prefer The Club unless it's crowded.

[Sudsy]

My wife and I prefer McDonald's coffee and probably have one, on average, every day. Some days instead or additionally, an Iced Capp. We prefer their coffee lids over Tim Horton's and we also accumulate the stickers from the cups for free coffees. However, I think the stickers thing is going to wrap up in August.

I enjoy paying for the the order of the car behind me as a good deed unless their order is more than just coffees. I have been blessed many times myself by some 'pay and forward' folks. One of my latest blessing came from a headcovered Mennonite lady. I caught up to her at the stop light, gave her a thumbs up and she waved back.

I did try a Starbucks coffee once but the one I got was too bitter tasting for my liking so we stick with McDonalds.

Within 5 minutes drive from home we have a Starbucks, two Tim Hortons, a McDonalds, an A&W, a Burger King, a Wendy's and various other places for a quick coffee. I can easily walk to most all of these or take my ebike. We just sold one of our cars as our lifestyle does no longer require two.

Well, enough of my worldly side.

[Ken]

Starbucks actually heavily over-roasts their coffee which is why it tastes bad. They do this on purpose and have been doing it for decades.

Way back in 1989 when Starbucks was still a small Seattle or Northwest company I had a meeting with the VP of Starbucks and main coffee buyer Dave Olsen in their Seattle HQ and he walked me through their entire operation. I had just gotten back from Guatemala where I had spent two and a half years working with coffee cooperatives in the Peace Corps and was basically investigating how it would be possible for small coffee cooperatives to avoid the middlemen coffee brokers and sell directly to US buyers. This was long before "fair trade" became a thing and that sort of thing became possible. Starbucks wasn't really interested in alternative sourcing and he explained why and how the market worked from their end.

In any event, something he told me was that one of the problems that Starbucks faced was that there was so much variation between the different batches of coffee the would get from different locations around the world, and even so much variation within a single location like Guatemala, that it was difficult for them to produce a consistent Guatemalan or Colombian or Ethiopian blend that would taste the same month after month. But by roasting all their coffee blends to what is essentially a French roast they could get them to basically taste the same. It was apparently easier to get their customers accustomed to consistently dark roasted coffee than it was to unexpected variations in flavor. Plus, they make most of their profit from flavored espresso drinks rather than drip coffee or straight espresso where the coffee flavor doesn't really matter anyway.

Honestly, the over-roasting kills any variety and subtlety in their coffee and I NEVER buy Starbucks coffee, drip or whole bean. I've actually been roasting my own for decades now, exactly how I like it and sourced from the exact farms in Guatemala and Costa Rica that I like. But that is another story.

In my experience buying coffee on road trips which is the only time I buy it by the cup, the best drip coffee is from McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts. But since we no longer have Dunkin Donuts out here on the west coast I pretty must just hit McDonalds.

[barnhart]

I want a cup of coffee at Ken's house.

[Ken]

I want a cup of coffee at Ken's house.

Roasting your own coffee is not hard. I've done it successfully about 6 different ways from using a modified $10 air popcorn popper bought from Walgreens to using the rotisserie attachment on my grill to using a heat gun (that you use for stripping paint) and a stainless steel metal bowl. There are endless redneck hacks for roasting coffee out there on YouTube:



Eventually my wife took pity on me and bought me a commercial drum coffee roaster that is about the size of a toaster oven but has a rotating mesh drum inside and that is what I use now.

The trick is finding a good source for green coffee. There are various online venders. I'm partial to a company out of Oakland called Sweet Marias that keeps a good variety in stock and does really interesting profiles of the farms and cooperatives that they work with. https://www.sweetmarias.com/

If you price it out, you can buy top quality unroasted coffee bulk for about $6-7/lb. https://www.sweetmarias.com/guatemala-a ... -7257.html

But if you price out the cost of similar quality roasted product it is usually more than $20/lb. https://www.intelligentsia.com/products ... -el-diviso if you look at the link they are selling Colombian for $23 per 12 ounce bag which comes to over $30/lb.

If you go through about a pound of roasted coffee per week as I do, that amounts to a serious savings and you end up with a much fresher roasted and flavorful beans. If you drink a lot of coffee you will pay for the price of a good coffee roaster in a few months. Green coffee also doesn't grow stale so you can buy it bulk in 20 lb. lots and it keeps fine. It only starts to go stale after you have roasted it so you only want to roast what you are going to immediately use.

The one thing about roasting your own coffee is that it can put out a lot of smoke so I either do it outside on the deck in warm weather, or on the top of my stove with the ventilation fan running full blast. Otherwise the smoke tends to set off the smoke detectors.

Costco used to have big coffee roasters in their warehouses and you could get top quality fresh roasted coffees there that was hard to beat. But they seem to have pulled them out and now just sell more stale bagged and sealed coffee from who knows where and that has been sitting in the warehouse for who knows how long. It is still cheaper but not as reliably good or fresh.

And then there is the whole question of how to brew the best coffee and that is a whole other endless discussion.

[wesleyb]

I want a cup of coffee at Ken's house.

Roasting your own coffee is not hard. I've done it successfully about 6 different ways from using a modified $10 air popcorn popper bought from Walgreens to using the rotisserie attachment on my grill to using a heat gun (that you use for stripping paint) and a stainless steel metal bowl. There are endless redneck hacks for roasting coffee out there on YouTube:



Eventually my wife took pity on me and bought me a commercial drum coffee roaster that is about the size of a toaster oven but has a rotating mesh drum inside and that is what I use now.

The trick is finding a good source for green coffee. There are various online venders. I'm partial to a company out of Oakland called Sweet Marias that keeps a good variety in stock and does really interesting profiles of the farms and cooperatives that they work with. https://www.sweetmarias.com/

If you price it out, you can buy top quality unroasted coffee bulk for about $6-7/lb. https://www.sweetmarias.com/guatemala-a ... -7257.html

But if you price out the cost of similar quality roasted product it is usually more than $20/lb. https://www.intelligentsia.com/products ... -el-diviso if you look at the link they are selling Colombian for $23 per 12 ounce bag which comes to over $30/lb.

If you go through about a pound of roasted coffee per week as I do, that amounts to a serious savings and you end up with a much fresher roasted and flavorful beans. If you drink a lot of coffee you will pay for the price of a good coffee roaster in a few months. Green coffee also doesn't grow stale so you can buy it bulk in 20 lb. lots and it keeps fine. It only starts to go stale after you have roasted it so you only want to roast what you are going to immediately use.

The one thing about roasting your own coffee is that it can put out a lot of smoke so I either do it outside on the deck in warm weather, or on the top of my stove with the ventilation fan running full blast. Otherwise the smoke tends to set off the smoke detectors.

Costco used to have big coffee roasters in their warehouses and you could get top quality fresh roasted coffees there that was hard to beat. But they seem to have pulled them out and now just sell more stale bagged and sealed coffee from who knows where and that has been sitting in the warehouse for who knows how long. It is still cheaper but not as reliably good or fresh.

And then there is the whole question of how to brew the best coffee and that is a whole other endless discussion.

Hey Ken, I read this while I was roasting a batch of coffee myself! I’ve been doing my own for several years now. I’d post a picture if I knew how. I use a heat gun blowing into a large flour sifter turned by a drill.

[RZehr]

I want a cup of coffee at Ken's house.

Me too. Now if I can get Ken, temp, and Ragpicker together. Anyone else want to come? Seems like Steve-in-kville would have some contributions. Anyone else who can either make food or eat food is welcome.