Skip to main content

Not the coffee fix you might be after....

Starbucks, the company which claims to bring coffee to the people, is on the march. Expansion is the name of the game. In heaven's name why anyone who really likes their coffee fix would see Starbucks filling that need is hard to imagine. In Australia Starbucks is said to not having fared all that well. Why should it? - when in Melbourne, in particular, real coffee is so readily available.

Whatever those who truly understand and appreciate coffee might think about Starbucks, Reuters reports that the chain is expanding in staggering numbers:

"US coffee shop giant Starbucks plans to open at least 40,000 more stores over the medium term, half of them outside the United States, according to Tuesday's Expansion newspaper.

Starbucks Chief Executive Jim Donald told the Spanish financial daily that the chain is expanding at a rate of six shops and 350 new employees per day.

"We will open at least 40,000 cafes (half of them outside the United States)" (in the medium term), Expansion quoted Donald as saying in the interview.

Starbucks will probably open between 10 and 12 shops per year in Spain, Donald told Expansion.

The company currently has more than 13,000 shops, 9,000 of them in the United States, with operations in 39 countries employing 130,000 people, according to the Expansion report".

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives?  In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t

The NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) goes on hold.....because of one non-Treaty member (Israel)

Isn't there something radically wrong here?    Israel, a non-signatory to the NPT has, evidently, been the cause for those countries that are Treaty members, notably Canada, the US and the UK, after 4 weeks of negotiation, effectively blocking off any meaningful progress in ensuring the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.    IPS reports ..... "After nearly four weeks of negotiations, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference ended in a predictable outcome: a text overwhelmingly reflecting the views and interests of the nuclear-armed states and some of their nuclear-dependent allies. “The process to develop the draft Review Conference outcome document was anti-democratic and nontransparent,” Ray Acheson, director, Reaching Critical Will, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), told IPS. “This Review Conference has demonstrated beyond any doubt that continuing to rely on the nuclear-armed states or their nuclear-dependent allies for l

#1 Prize for a bizarre story.....and lying!

No comment called for in this piece from CommonDreams: Another young black man: The strange sad case of 21-year-old Chavis Carter. Police in Jonesboro, Arkansas  stopped  him and two friends, found some marijuana, searched put Carter, then put him handcuffed  behind his back  into their patrol car, where they say he  shot himself  in the head with a gun they failed to find. The FBI is investigating. Police Chief Michael Yates, who stands behind his officers' story,  says in an interview  that the death is "definitely bizarre and defies logic at first glance." You think?