In my optimistic moments, I think, wow, Starbucks IS nice. Not only did they fess up to the “break down in customer service,” but the company flew Major — who took a lotta time out to chat with me — down to LA and arranged a meeting for bloggers and LA-based managers. AND the mermaid promised to step up within the next 9 months.

Then I either sober up or wake up to a hangover, and think: Damn it, it’s been years already since activists have pointed out how Starbucks hasn’t been living up to its fair trade promises. Can’t they just fucking do it already?

Usually, I’m somewhere in the middle. I hear what the LA managers said about how difficult it is to make all the Starbucks stores step up to the challenge. But I also don’t think it has to be as hard as they make it sound.

Thus, my 9-day Post-It solution.

It’s simple. Stick a Post-It like the one to the right on every cash register, and leave it there for 9 days. Then each barista working the register would see the lil note, do as it says, and the “break down” would go away.

Yes, Starbucks would need to get the store managers to actually do the sticking part. Email obviously doesn’t work so well for the mermaid, so I suggest a phone tree. The CSR department puts an hour into calling all the regional directors. The regional directors call each of their district managers. The district managers call each of their store managers. And the store managers write up the 3-4 Post-Its necessary, depending on how many cash registers are in store.

Yes, some baristas may not see or bother to read the note. But most will. And if they have questions about the procedure, they can ask their managers about it — further educating the baristas about the fair-trade-on-demand policy.

Yes, Starbucks would need to make sure that this Post-It doesn’t get covered up with other lil notes. The other notes, if any, may need to be removed for 9 days.

It would, in essence, require that Starbucks make meeting this policy a bit of a priority for 9 days, as opposed to hoping the message’ll trickle through the company chain-of-command in the next 9 months.

Back when I talked to Joel Makower about the challenge, he said that a big Starbucks exec was part of a “green” panel that basically asked “How much is ‘enough’?” Like Roger, gone green’s said before: “It sounds like Starbucks is *almost* there; the problem is they also sound classic stage two, where the mantra is “we are already doing a lot, more than other people, how much do they want!”

I’m not REALLY an ungrateful bitch… It’s just that Starbucks says it wants to be a CSR leader in the industry. The mermaid even got a lil blurb in the “fair trade” section of the latest TIME — right up next to the saint-like, 100% fair trade co-op Equal Exchange, to my shock and horror. The two companies are very, VERY different, to say the least.

My idealistic alter-ego wonders if Starbucks was just waiting for something simple, like my 9-day Post-It solution, cuz the mermaid really, really wants to do more, to do better –

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