I must be like the only person in San Francisco without a laptop. What’s a blogger to do?

Thus, a very, very incomplete list of coffee shops that offer not only fair trade coffee but computer time for those who, like me, can’t access the free wifi in every coffee shop in town (except at Starbucks — there you gotta pay for Tmobile).

Mac lovers — try Quetzal Internet Cafe. You’ll notice the neon signs proudly announcing its “organic fair trade coffee”! Also — Quetzal makes yummy smoothies.

Cost: 16 cents per minute. Kinda pricy.

Where: 1234 Polk St San Francisco. 415.673.4181.

Prefer PCs? Go to Cafe Organica. It’s where I am right now, drinking water (too much coffee today) and clicking away. [Update, 11/11/06: Cafe Organica closed!]

Cost: $2 for 15 mins (minimum), $3 for 30, $5 for 1 hour, and $15 per day if you’d rather blog than see what San Francisco looks like outside.

Where: 562 Central Avenue. San Francisco. 415.441.1338.

Must dash now to make it to the Commonwealth Club. Feel free to add your fave fair trade coffee serving internet cafes in San Francisco in the comments –

Update, 2/3/06: Rockin’ Java in Haight also offers fair trade coffee with Mac access :)

Tags: sanfrancisco, internet, coffee, fairtrade

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A series that runs every Tuesday, where I ask random questions unrelated to the environment, fair trade, or local politics. Questions I’ve been wondering about but haven’t been able to google the answers to. Any advice is appreciated.

Need a gmail account? I have like 100 invites. Lemme know and I’ll email you one.

I’ve noticed people don’t smile as much in NoCal. As a SoCalian, I find this jarring. That said, some people say Angelenos are superfake, smiling when they don’t mean it. If you had to choose, would you live in San Francisco or Los Angeles? Why?

This was a big, tough debate in the grad student lounge. Say you have a new son and you live in the US, where circumcision’s common. To cut or not to cut?

And lastly, another meme-type thing. Blame Nicole for this one.

4 jobs I’ve had in my life: Hotel front desk person. Newspaper intern. Blogger. Grad student.

4 movies I could watch over and over: La Dolce Vita. The Secretary. Donnie Darko. American Psycho.

4 TV shows I love: (I’m including ones that’re over) Scrubs (reminds me of my sis). The Office (British version). Smurfs. Sex & the City (I heart Miranda).

4 places I’ve lived: Kijabe, Kenya. Nampa, Idaho. New York City. Greencastle, Indiana.

4 places I’ve been on vacation: Chicago. Seoul. Montreal. Dijon.

4 websites I visit daily: Silliman’s Blog. Gmail. Technorati. green LA girl.

4 places I’d rather be right now: The Village, NYC. Los Angeles. Alone in my room. A bubbly bathtub.

4 bloggers I’m tagging: Rodger. Jason. esteban. Jasmin.

Tags: gmail, meme, sanfrancisco, losangeles, circumcision

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What makes fair trade-loving people work at Starbucks? Today I met Michael, a Starbucks manager at the store on Masonic & Fulton who’s become like the go-to guy for Starbucks fair trade stuff in San Francisco.

Michael has a TransFair USA sticker on the store door (right). He has colorful bags of Cafe Estima — the green ones printed during fair trade month — lining the top shelf of his coffee display. And he brews Cafe Estima, Starbucks’ only fair trade certified blend, from about 2 pm to close almost every day — It was brewing when I walked in.

“I was researching companies that cared about corporate social responsibility,” Michael said, “and Starbucks’ name kept coming up.”

The cynic in me thinks this may be because Starbucks puts a lotta money into PR for their CSR efforts. Still, it sounds like Michael’s gotten to lotsa nice things he wanted to do when he took the job, from getting involved with Little Kids Rock to donating pastries to the Haight-Ashbury Food Program to brewing extra Cafe Estima.

It seems that Starbucks managers have some leeway to inject a lil personal passion — into their stores. So while there may be little corporate push to market Cafe Estima, managers can provide that push — a freedom most managers don’t, or don’t know they can, take advantage of.

Fair trade’s a priority for Michael’s store, at least. Which made me ask why he wasn’t working for a non-profit really dedicated to fair trade issues. To which he said he’s not ruling out moving to a non-profit, but he’s getting to do some great stuff at the mermaid.

As to why so many Starbucks stores are failing the Starbucks Challenge? Michael named the usual reasons: the difficulty of getting all part time employees trained, the mass of corporate communications thrown at the partners, the many competing priorities Starbucks has.

It’s very clear that if Starbucks wants to really meet the challenge, the mermaid’s going to have to make that a priority, not just send out an additional corporate email or an article in Scoop.

Michael’s parting words: “I’m glad you’re doing what you’re doing. That’s all I’m gonna say”

Tags: sanfrancisco, coffee, fairtrade, starbucks, starbuckschallenge

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Just wrote a long post, at which point my friend Melvin’s Galeon web browser crashed :(

To make it worse, Mel’s coffee maker don’t work. Meaning I’ll have to go for a lil morning jog to the local coffee shop here in Oakland — which would be a pleasant lil trek, if it were after a nice warm cuppa fair trade coffee –

In the meantime,check out Elsa over at the greener side, and her take on our shopping trip for green clothes on Saturday. It was raining, but hell or high water, we were gonna hit Otsu and Fabuloid…

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It was the store on Robertson and Pico, with the auspicious priviledge of being the Starbucks outlest nearest me. It’s also where we had the meeting with the LA-area Starbucks managers.

So when I walked in around noon yesterday, I thought it’d be easy. Especially when I saw a basket that announced Cafe Estima as the coffee of the week.

Barista: We’re not brewing that right now. We have [named 2 blends].

Me: Oh. Um, can I still get a cup?

Barista: The coffees rotate, you understand what I’m saying? It’s not brewing right now.

Me: Oh. Do you think I could get a cup in a French press?

Barista: A French-press… We don’t… (Turns to another barista, repeats my request to her; barista2 looks at me quizzically). Do you understand what I’m saying? We’re not brewing that right now. They rotate. Thank you. (cocks his head towards the door)

Was it something I said? Or do I just look English illiterate?

Tags: starbuckschallenge, coffee, fairtrade

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I wish I’d listened more in ECON 101. But it was at 9 am, I was invariably hung over, and the class was big enough that I could just fall asleep, head on desk, without notice.

Cuz I feel like I really missed something important about why “free trade” often isn’t free. I don’t see its free-ness so much in the world around me.

On the other hand, listening to the constant drone of “hurray for free trade, down with fair trade” people makes me think I really didn’t miss much… Maybe I just wasn’t as heavily inculcated by the “free trade” drone cuz, you know, I was napping.

ECON 101 was really simplistic. Increase supply, and prices will go down. Increase demand, and prices will go up. The forces of the market regulate the prices, which fluctuate depending on supply and demand.

Apply that to coffee, and the simplistic argument goes: Farmers are just growing too much coffee. They need to realize that the market’s just not gonna pay ‘em good money cuz the supply of coffee exceeds demand. Thus, it’s “good” that these farmers are being driven off their land, cuz they should really be doing other stuff, not producing coffee. So quit yer whinin’, farmers and fair traders — farmers going broke’s a win-win situation for free trade!

What I didn’t get from ECON 101 is why it’s just the coffee farmers that’re suffering. Cuz the multinational companies selling coffee aren’t exactly hurting from this coffee glut.

You’d think that if green coffee beans became dirt cheap, some of that cheapness would translate into the final price for the customer — and cut into the profits for these big companies.

Ok — I know it’s more complicated than that, because a lot of what we’re paying for when we buy a cup of coffee in the US isn’t the coffee itself. We’re paying transportation costs, roasting costs, packaging costs, marketing costs, retail space costs, barista training costs, etc. etc.

Still, I’d think that a serious overproduction of coffee would have some consequenses for other parties in the coffee chain beyond the farmer.

Why don’t I see those consequences?

Note: I realize “free trade” and “fair trade” aren’t mutually exclusive, but I’m looking for answers in terms of the conventional definitions “free trade.” You know, the kind that’s anti fair trade.

My question’s simple, and not rhetorical — After all, “free trade” diehards often pride themselves in their simple, elegant solutions: What is the “free trade” explanation for why coffee farmers are suffering while no one else in the coffee chain seems to be suffering with them?

Curious to find out — Feel free to rail at me for completely misrepresenting the “free trade” side of the argument. Like I said, I think I must be missing something, cuz I just don’t get it.

Hoping I’ll have some answers by the time I get to San Francisco later tonight –

Tags: fairtrade, coffee, freetrade, economics

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For those of you who moved to the US from the UK or Australia: I know what’s been keeping you up at night. You’re wondering why the US fair trade certification label (left) is so uncute.

I don’t blame ya. Look at the logo used in the UK and Australia (right). Much prettier and more colorful, yet simple enough to be incorporated into cappuccino foam (see my banner for ex).

Why do the countries have different logos, you ask? Cuz different organizations do the certifications in different countries. For Britain, it’s the Fairtrade Foundation. And for the US, it’s TransFair USA.

In fact, 20 fair trade labeling initiatives are part of the Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International (FLO-International), which serves as an umbrella organization for all of these different labellers.

Which is why the anonymous commenter, aka “get it straight please!” got so pissed about my using the TransFair USA logo on my last post about Nestle. To be clear, Nestle’s fair trade certified blend — Partner’s Blend — is only avaliable in the UK and was certified by UK’s Fairtrade Foundation, and thus carries the prettier seal.

Meaning TransFair USA has not certified any product of Nestle’s.

Yet. UK’s Fairtrade Federation may be a separate organization, but it has set a precedent of sorts for other FLO-International members.

But back to the fair trade labels themselves. We don’t have 20 different logos, but we still have enough of them to make it confusing. So confusing, in fact, that FLO lists “Why do so many different Fairtrade labels exist?” as one of the questions in its FAQ.

Which is why I was happy to read on the FLO-International website today that “FLO has started the process of harmo-nising the different Labels into one International Image.”

Cuz, not surprisingly, “The National Initiatives and FLO have recognised the need for a single logo for a long while, mainly for two reasons: it increases clarity for consumers and it makes cross-border trade easier.”

And that common logo’s gonna be the pretty one, currently used in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, maybe some other countries, and in the green LA girl banner.

It seems it’ll take a lil while for the pretty logo to conquer the other logos. Still, I’m looking forward to it — It’ll take away the impetus for angry comments from the likes of “get it straight please!” — demanding not only that I stop confusing “stakeholders and consumers” but also that I get a new banner for my blog. Jeez.

Update, 2/1/06: Now I hear from TransFair USA that “At the moment, the plan is for the UK, EU, and ANZACS to have the same logo, while the US, Canada, and Mexico will keep theirs.” Damn!

Tags: coffee, fairtrade, nestle, flo, transfair,

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Many of you know that Nestle created some serious dissention when it entered the fair trade market. But most of you don’t know why it was such a big deal.

Thus, an explanation.

The problem: The fair trade certification seal (left), a seal which most people equate with the fair trade movement, is awarded for the PRODUCT, not the company. Unfortunately, it seems that lots of people think that the seal’s offered to the COMPANY, not just the product.

(Update, 1/26/06: I updated the image to the left to clarify that Nestle was offered the fair trade seal by the UK Fairtrade Federation, which does the fair trade certification for UK products — Nestle’s Partner’s Blend is only avaliable in the UK. TransFair USA, which certifies the US products, was uninvolved with the whole Nestle debacle. More details on the different fair trade logos here.)

This creates a problem, especially in the case of Nestle. Now, Nestle, the most boycotted company in the world, played — and still plays — a LARGE part in CREATING the coffee crisis. Yet, a few months ago, the company also launched a blend called “Partner’s Blend” — An instant coffee that’s fair trade certified.

Meaning — The farmers who produce the coffee for this one product are compensated fairly. Yey!

However, Partner’s Blend makes up less than .1% of Nestle’s coffee imports. This means that more than 99.9% of Nestle’s coffee’s bought through “conventional” channels, allowing Nestle to make good profits at the expense of the farmers who’re more or less forced to sell their coffee below cost.

Which means that people who see the fair trade seal on Nestle’s Partner’s Blend may assume that Nestle’s changed their ways, when really, Nestle’s done damn little, especially for an international company that has the money and power to make big changes.

Meaning, Nestle may just be using the fair trade seal on their Partner’s Blend to greenwash their image.

Thus, lots of seriously dedicated fair trade coffee companies are pissed, PISSED, that they’re now sharing the same seal as big bad Nestle.

Take Equal Exchange, for example. This is a 100% fair trade co-op, fully dedicated to the fair trade cause. Rodney, “The Answer Man” at Equal Exchange (yes, that’s actually his official title), wrote a long, passionate letter about this: “we see this as the latest in a long line of actions by the world’s largest food business to make small gestures that look good in solation, but ultimately forestall real change for impoverished small farmers, and instead offer marketing, PR, and token efforts in its place.”

Patti Rundall of Baby Milk Action agreed: “To give a Fair Trade mark to a company whose baby food trade systematically violates child rights on such a massive scale makes an absolute mockery of what the public believes the Fair Trade mark stands for.”

Amy Barry of Oxfam disagreed somewhat, saying Nestlé’s move was “a very small step” in the right direction: “We would welcome it, but with very big caveats.”

There’s no question why Nestle would want in. In the UK, fair trade has big cache. There, fair trade brands account for about 4% sales of instant coffee and 18% of roast and ground coffee. There’s also no question: Nestle’s huge. It’s considered one of the “big four.” Some say that Nestle’s entry into the fair trade market will encourage the other biggies to do so as well.

We’ll be talking about such issues at the “New challenges in the fair trade movement” workshop at the United Students for Fair Trade convergence next month. But I’m curious to hear what your thoughts are, reader.

What should we as activists focus on? Should we work to educate others that the fair trade logo goes for the product, NOT the company? Or should we demand higher overall commitments to fair trade from the companies that’re seeking the fair trade seal?

BTW — I have Rodney’s permission to circulate the letter — Just lemme know if you’re interested, and I’ll email you a copy.

Update: 2/10/06: A followup post — Greenwashing while badmouthing fair trade.

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Why were so many stores NOT brewing the fair trade Cafe Estima the first week of January, when it was supposed to be featured as the coffee of the week?

Mystery solved: This week was also designated as “Manager’s Brew” week — basically, a “get rid of all the old coffee inventory” week — at Starbucks. So, a lotta managers decided to brew the unpopular stuff that had been cluttering up the store closets instead of Cafe Estima.

I got this info via Pat, a district manager who pulled together the LA managers meeting about the Starbucks Challenge last month. “I believe it was just a marketing communications issue,” he said, in a very apologetic tone.

Basically, it seems that one department (CSR?) said, hey, let’s kick off the year with our fair trade certified blend (Cafe Estima)!. Another department said, hey, let’s kick off the year by getting rid of all the old inventory. The two didn’t talk to each other, so Cafe Estima ended up getting shafted.

If only the mermaid would take a breather from it’s super-aggressive expansion and proliferation to take a look at all the breakdowns happening in their stores… At this point, Cafe Estima’s hit so many Starbucks road blocks that this seems like more than just an unfortunate coincidence to many. Especially when Cindy, the CSR rep who’s been involved with the Starbucks Challenge, halts all communication. It’s been over 2 weeks now…

Tags: starbucks, starbuckschallenge, coffee, fairtrade

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This’ll be a series that runs every Tuesday, where I ask random questions unrelated to the environment, fair trade, or local politics. Questions I’ve been wondering about but haven’t been able to google the answers to. I’ll warn ya — Some are odd, some are frightening, and some deal with death. Any advice is appreciated.

Back in my young, nerdier days, I collected stamps. Organizing them provided hours, nay DAYS, of anal, organizational amusement that didn’t attract the attention, anger or criticism of my almost-always angry and critical father. The thing is, I moved out once I turned 18, and don’t collect these anymore. I do, however, have a bunch of commemorative Korean stamps from the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. Someone told me a while back that these’re worth a lot of money now. I could use that money, but how do I get it? Where do I trade foreign commemorative stamps for moolah in the US?

I’ve officially drunk my local Trader Joe’s out of all Bodegas Iranzo wines, as well as both the Five Hills Blue merlot and cabernet. Are these organic wines still avaliable at other LA Trader Joe’s? Or should I order a case of wine for my V-day party directly from an organic winery?

Is it unhealthy to take more than the recommended dosage of Claritin? One a day seems rather low…

My late father — who was not only gullible but also a non-native English speaker, did some silly things. One of these: buying a bunch of “authentic” 1999 $1 silver certificates from the National Collector’s Mint. As the gal assigned to combing through all the junk my father left behind, I’m not sure what to do with these. Are they worthless? Should I just try to recycle them? Or are they worth holding on to? Can I sell them? And if so, where? (Update, 2/11/06: I successfully sold these certificates on ebay for $71.67, per Fletch’s advice! Thanks Fletch! Was super psyched, till I looked at the old receipt and found out what my late father originally paid: $417.)

What are your thoughts on Nip/Tuck?

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