Welcome to Starschmucks
Having been gallavanting up and down the country for the past two weeks, life has inevitably reached that level of activity where I seem to be living out of Starbucks. Now Starbucks have been rapidly going out of favour with me since I started reading about their obscene profits in the business sections of numerous free papers. What can I say? I spend far too much time on trains. Yes, everybody knows that Starbucks are a vast profiteering soul-destroying financial monolith of economical gluttony.
But aren't they smug about their Fairtrade coffee?
Rest assured, even in these times of desitution and pennilessness, the likes of Starschmucks and their equally morally-empowered friends will waste no time in clobbering you if you dare to purchase a jar of 69p instant shite from the local Tesco. "How dare you?" they shall say, from atop their lofty pedestal of virtue. "You cold-hearted capitalist SCUM? Don't you know how much you're ripping off the poor peasant farmers? I bet you steal sweets from small children and eat bunnies for breakfast, you beast! If you had a heart, you would buy your coffee from US! Look, all our coffee cups have photos of happy smiling Africans on the side. See? Look - HAPPY. Put the Mellow Birds down, step away. Drink this. Now. And then give us some money. Lots of money."
Blithely ignoring the fact that for every £3.90 cardboard cup of froth purchased in Starbucks, a grand total of about 26p goes to the hard-working farmers whose rights they so fiercely defend. Fairtrade has become almost as much of a lifestyle label as Prada. You're not just buying a coffee, you are drinking in so much goodness that you leave the shop with a Mother Theresa-type glow about you, blessing the poor and even having a crack at healing the sick before telling the beggar outside to sod off because you've now done your charity bit for the day so he'll have to get his heroin money elsewhere. Congratulations, you have just bought your own little slice of sainthood. And all it cost you was six quid and a chunk of your soul.
Starbucks, meanwhile, are cavorting around on a big pile of cash, pissing themselves laughing, while the coffee farmers they claim to love grovel at their feet in gratitude because, thanks to the lovely people of Starbucks, they can now afford to build a small corrugated steel hut to house all five generations of their forty-seven-strong family. Compared to the company themselves (Starbucks made $9411million last year - no, that's not a typo - and owner Howard D. Schultz is worth $1.1 billion) this seems like a bit of a bum deal if you ask me, and NOT, as the name would suggest, a fair trade.
Other marketting scams and price-hike rip-offs cunningly disguised as moral superiority, ethical values or promises of improved quality are the following:
Corn fed chicken: What's the deal? Where I come from, yellow = jaundice.
Coke Zero: An accurate description, I'll give them that. No sugar, no caffeine, no flavourings, no additives, no calories, NO... SODDING.... POINT!
Marks & Spencers: "It's not just food..." No, if you look closely enough, I think you'll find it is.
Organic: Don't get me started. Just don't.