As many of my friends will tell you, I’m a fan of a good cup of coffee. While on business trips, therefore, I tend to suffer due to the appallingly awful stuff that US hotels try to pass off as my favourite caffeinated beverage. As a result a Starbucks in the airport is usually a welcome sight.
This Friday, I succumbed to temptation and bought my usual Grande Mocha in Chicago O’Hare. I am used to paying in excess of $3 for a Starbuck’s coffee but this one came in at $4.17. How can I justify paying more for a single cup of coffee than I often pay for my whole lunch?
The whole issue of coffee pricing has been important to me for some time now. A while ago, I started running a fair trade coffee stall at church as part of the Presbyterian Coffee Project. This project aims to ensure that coffee farmers, long taken advantage of by unscrupulous middlemen and profit-hungry corporations, receive a fair price for the coffee they grow. Aside from being the moral thing to do, the beans make a darn good cup of coffee and actually cost less than the loose beans sold at our local supermarket.
If you live in the UK, you are fortunate enough to be able to buy fair trade coffee from Cafe Direct in many supermarkets. As far as I can tell, there are no fair trade brands easily available in Texas stores but you can buy direct from Equal Exchange on the web via their store on Yahoo!.