For those of you who’ve been wondering about the Starbucks Challenge stats — Since October 2005, when the challenge began, 331 challenges have been taken, with 209 blogs participating!
Despite the fact that the next official Starbucks Challenge has been delayed until mid-April, Challengers have been keeping at it. Recent stats: Since Challenge 3.5 ended, we’ve had 32 challenges taken. Of these, 18 were failures, 14 successes.
Which means that in the 5 months since Challengers have started going in to their local Starbucks and asking for fair trade coffee, Starbucks has clearly been working vigilantly on its “break down in customer service” (sarcasm here) — to reach a whopping 44% success rate :(
The success rate has actually gone DOWN since the Starbucks Challenge began — but I think this is due more to the fact that most of the latest challenges were taken in the US, where successes are rather tough to come by. During the original challenge in October, we had a lot of challengers from the UK joining in — There, due to consumer demand, fair trade coffee’s brewing every day at almost all Starbucks, making successes more likely.
Well — Starbucks says change comes slowly. By the time Challenge 4.0 rolls around, it’ll’ve been 6 months. We’ll see what Starbucks can manage to accomplish in half a year…
In the meantime, you can check out Starbucks’ 76-page 2005 Corporate Social Responsibility report and read about Starbucks’ unwavering commitment to fair trade in more detail (sarcasm again).
why try to bring the dinosaur back to life! take thegroovymind challenge. get your office to convert from conventional coffee/tea to organic Fair Trade. after the launch of http://www.thegroovymind.com last year, we were contacted by a Fashion Trade group in NYC b/c an employee did just that. He staged a side by side tasting of conventional vs. organic FT coffee/tea and thegroovymind won hands down! slow roasted to order coffee and seasonally harvested tea, babee…
give up on the corporate stiffs and take the high road!
Comment by melanie — March 12, 2006 @ 12:10 pm
What do you mean back to life? Starbucks has been v. much alive and kicking, consitently, in many of our ‘hoods –
Like I’ve written in the FAQ, we (City Hippy and I) don’t advocate making the mermaid your primary source of coffee — We’re just asking people to stop by their local Starbucks once or a few times to see if the mermaid’s living up to its promises –
Comment by Siel — March 15, 2006 @ 12:57 am