(no subject)
My mom told me that because of a no competition clause in Caribou's contract the coffee place by Video Update has to shut down. Despite the fact that the other coffee shop has been there for years, now that Caribou is in the area, it isn't able to renew its lease. A single woman has been able to keep a local business open in St. Anthony for what I'm guessing is more than four years almost completely by herself, and now she has to change her life because a corporation that already makes millions of dollars a year has an actual legal monopoly on coffee in the area. How can that be right? I hate that this is the way that the world works, and I hate that all that corporate shit at Apache is part of our community now. When these kinds of things happen, I'm reminded of the horrible contradictions in my own life and in the things that I'm ranting about at this moment. I make so many choices on a regular basis, and many of them are not the right ones. I say how much I despise Walmart, yet can't live without Target. I try and convince my mom to buy organic food, but I go and buy fast food on a regular basis. Then I try and justify it by saying that Chipotle uses free-range chicken and that Target is a Minnesota company that gives back to the community. I know I shouldn't be too hard on myself because I am young, I'm just deciding what I think is really important in the world, and I can't afford to do a lot of the things I would like to do in terms of avoiding corporations. But this is the time in my life where I need to re-evaluate my morals and make the right decisions. This situation just makes me so sad. I feel especially sad because corporate coffee is something that can be so easily avoided in our neighborhood, and coffee from a little, local place is usually better anyway. So in a very inarticulate conclusion, Caribou sucks, I pretty much suck too, and you should all go to local coffee houses like Audubon Coffee which is delicious.