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Starbucks might not make your favourite cup of joe, and you might even believe that the coffee giant is ruining your neighbourhood, but that doesn't mean that it's easy to refuse a free cup of freshly-brewed stimulation.
This morning from 10 a.m. until noon, Starbucks locations across North America are giving away free Tall brewed coffees in their Second Annual National Coffee Break. While you're waiting in line, feel free to discuss the commoditization of the Starbucks experience, how their new music label is bound to suck, or their questionable labour practices.
But be careful not to get hooked on the stuff, or you might wind up like the guy who is on a mission to photograph every Starbucks location in the world. Remember: you get the first cup for free, but then they jack-up the price.
Photo by Torontochub27 from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.
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Why exactly is there a post on Starbucks? As far as I can tell this doesn't really relate to Toronto news. This has crossed the line between news and advertisng. Perhaps we have a double agent.
Kind of agrre with Andy, but imagine it was posted to turn people on to the free coffee...(free is good).
I DO like the link to the Starbucks Union website.
I give them credit for
"allowing" it to even exist as most companies would try to find a way fo crushing something like that. I also didn't realize the IWW (Wobblys) still existed. Very Cool. The IWW was formed back in the days when complaining to your' boss or going on strike got your' head kicked in or got you shot.
Other than accusing someone of plagiarism, there's no more serious charge you can make against a journalist than that they are in somebody's pocket.
It's totally unfair to call this post advertising.
Set aside, for a moment, the fact that we're not getting paid one penny to post this, the post is far more weighed to the anti-Starbucks camp than the pro. There is a link to a survey that ranks Starbucks coffee below McD's, a link to the IWW site and snark concerning the record label. If Starbucks had paid for it, they would definitely be asking for their money back.
We take these things very seriously, as you might imagine. We discussed this and decided that the event was of sufficient interest to our readers to warrant a post. In order to balance the mere mention of a corporate giant, we balanced the piece with, I think, more than enough Starbucks criticism to make it clear that we weren't shilling for them.
Torontoist will never sneak an advertisement into a post. If there's ever any kind of sponsorship for any of our content (which, as of yet, there hasn't been -- but, say that Henry's sponsors the Daily Photoist or something), that sponsorship will be made explicitly clear. Did you even read the post, Andy, or did you just look at the photo and get all huffy?
Human Nature 101: People lo-o-o-ove "free," even if it is only filtered bean water that costs Starbucks next to nothing.
People will actually gladly pay extra for something (or buy something they wouldn't otherwise have bought) if something allegedy free comes with it. "Wow, that restaurant is so expensive and I'm not really hungry. I don't think we -- wait! A free appetizer tonight only? Let's all go!"
Anyone who's worked under some sort of corporate promotion in the service industry will relate. I used to work at Tim Hortons and customers would practically line up for twenty minutes to get a free Timbit conditional on upsizing their order.
Just got mine from Queen/Bay with no line-up. Yay coffee!
Walking out of a Starbucks (or any store/bar/restaurant) with something along with the same amount of money in your' pocket as when you walked in is a nice little victory.
Make it fun, think of it as shoplifting. "Dude, they gave me my coffee but forgot to charge me, sweet.....Dude, where's my car? Oh, wait, we took the TTC....shibby"
Thanks for reminding me - just picked up my free cup.
Actually, it IS easy to refuse a coffee, if it's from Starbucks. Do something for your locality: Reject franchises.
The only ones getting huffy are Ken and David. I was being facetious with the double agent comment. I actually quite like the photo.
If it's a slow news day don't give us inane "news".
Let's analyse this a bit further. What is the intention of this Starbucks promotion? By giving away free coffee they are clearly hoping to attract new customers (Marketing 101). You are assisting them ("Get Thee to a Starbucks") in accomplishing this task by futher promoting them.
Last time I checked this blog was called Torontoist. Which means you should be covering Toronto news. This is barely passable in that regard.
In news, the slant of the story is always quite relevant and although you did include a number of links attempting to shield you from criticism ultimately this "article" is about free coffee.
Just taking something because it's free typifies the consumerist attitude which has made Wal Mart such a success. I agree with Toby, just say no and reject the franchises. Especially ones that have poor labour practices, experiences and bad coffee.
Grow an editorial voice.
A.
I think that in an era where corporate vs. independent is an issue with so many grey areas- major studios releasing "indie" films, Walmart selling organic vegetables- that it's shortsighted to dismiss Starbucks simply on the grounds that it's a franchise. In fact, blindly supporting smaller businesses only supports the commercial competition that is inherent to capitalism: The Rebel Sell agues this.
So if you actually find the coffee at Moonbeam in Kensington better than elsewhere, great. But to make a broad generalization that Starbucks sells "bad coffee" is incorrect- some people enjoy their coffee; the fact that they roast it so as to have consistently more caffeine than its competitors and appeal to peoples' dependency on coffee would make a stronger argument.
"Eww, you got Starbucks?"
"Yea, it was free"
"But they suck and their coffee is shit"
"I know, but it's ok, and it was free and I'll just spend the money I saved at my own coffeeshop later"
"But they're evil and they aren't fair to their employees and this is just some cheesy marketing trick to sucker you in like some crack addict"
"Well, yeah, but it's not like I'm going back there and I don't support them by buying their coffee...I was on my way to work/school and this was free"
"Yeah, but their like..."
"IT WAS FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!"
(you have to imagine the person with the coffee as Adam Snadler, makes it funnier)
I don't actually like Starbucks coffee (I normally drink my coffee black but with Starbucks I need to cut it with loads of milk and sugar) but I don't make a huge amount of money so I'm happy to get something free. Now if only there were places to get fair trade coffee in Toronto. That would make me way happier than my free coffee did.
Actually, I find the ham-fistedness of the article to be the true annoyance. Why does alerting people to a free coffee article require you to counterbalance it with three paragraphs of agitprop and cheap shots? Why can't you just let your readers determine for themselves whether they want to indulge in the starbucks offer? This page would be a lot better and a lot less aggravating if you didn't take the arrogant stance of telling your readers how to think and propound to be the voice of ethical objection.
I appreciate you have opinions and that they filter through to the content and, where relevant to the issue (e.g., gentrification), a critique of franchise coffee houses can be offered, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the subject of the post. Typically, you condescend that your readers have not themselves worked through the ethics of the offer, and instead need to be fed the (highly mediated) "facts" from the wisened editiors and writers.
That it required a consensus from the editors to publish a piece on free coffee should demonstrate beyond reproach that you have lost the plot on what your role as editors is or should be. That you immediately jumped in to defend yourselves when the inevitable anti-corporate speciousness kicked in demonstrates that what you are really after is preserving your cred among the no logo set, not delivering a good reader experience.
My only complaint is that I didn't know about this sooner ;) I have been seeing it on all the American blogs for weeks and I kind of assumed they'd skip Canada.
Next year!
Andy,
You have have just been joking about the "double agent" thing, but this is a serious charge because there are LOTS of bloggers out there who are being paid to post positive notes about companies or politicians or whatnot.
It's important to us that our readers know that we're not sell-outs. If someone is endorsing us, you'll know about it.
Here's what's great about this website: a short post about free coffee at Starbucks can inspire several pages of comments about the nature of the site, what our role in the Toronto media is, the struggle between big corporations and little guys, etc., all pretty big ideas.
It really shows how engaged the readers of this site are and how personally involved in the process they feel. That is one of the main reasons that I wanted to write for this site.
I'm still pretty new as a contributor to this site. So I wanted to point out here that anything you dislike (or like!) about the post is 100% my responsibility. The writers at Torontoist have a great deal of freedom and we operate with very little editorial oversight.
In this case, since I'm still pretty new, I ran the idea past the editors a few days ago, and they said 'go for it.' I realized that it might seem like a product placement if done straight up, so I added in the rest of the content to give it a more personal and opinionated feel, a certain bloggyness. Before it was posted, I ran it by the editors again and they cleaned up a couple things, but it remains essentially as I wrote it.
My point is, that if you have a problem with the piece, it's my fault, not the fault of the editors.
Also, I apologize that this didn't go on the site yesterday so that more of our readers could have taken advantage of the offer. I just got swamped with other work and couldn't do this up until this morning.
Thanks to all for reading Torontoist. Keep making your voices heard! After all, that is what makes this a vibrant community.
I'm not really gonna engage in this conversation much more -- Ken's doing a valiant job of defending his intentions.
Suffice to say that I don't see the big deal. There's free coffee in Toronto, at a place that a lot of people in Toronto would otherwise pay for coffee at. And the editors (hey, that's me!) didn't have to engage in fierce deliberation to get this post published; Ken asked Marc and me about it, and we said "yep."
Some of you need to make like a Starbucks™©® White Chocolate Mocha©™ Frappuccino® and chill.
I don't like coffee in general, or Starbucks in particular, so saying no to a free cup of coffee from Starbucks would be just about the easiest thing I could do.
I wasn't anywhere near a starbucks yesterday (14hrs on York Campus instead), but I can tell Kate that you can get fair-trade coffee in Toronto. Moonbeam Cafe in Kensington has fair-trade organic coffee (beans and grounds for sale too) and Timothy's also carries "Las Nubes" which is a project in Costa Rica started through York. So even on York campus, you can get fair-trade organic coffee. see www.yorku.ca/fes/fesnews/LasNubes_partners.asp