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Monday, October 11, 2010

Research Paper on Starbucks

Research Paper on Starbucks

Starbucks is the number-one specialty coffee retailer in the United States of America. Starbucks was founded in 1971. The first store was opened in Seattle, Washington at Pike Place Market. Starbucks currently has 5,888 stores. They continue to grow and are opening new stores one right after the other. Florida currently has 110 stores with hopes to have over 600 by the year 2005. One of the things Starbucks prides in is the awards it has received for ethics and social responsibilities. Starbucks is very big on giving back to the community and conservation.

Part of the Starbucks mission statement is to: Contribute positively to our communities and our environment. Partners (employees) take that mission personally, putting in many hours of volunteer time for their local neighborhoods and non-profit groups. From AIDS walks to tutoring kids to serving meals for the homeless, Starbucks partners prove that they care.

Each Starbucks store chooses a charity to receive its leftover pastries and past-date coffee. Many stores donate coffee to charitable events each month. One of these events in neighborhoods is called “Green Sweep”. “Green Sweep” is trash pickups in different communities and other efforts that go along with that. Starbucks partners also invite people of the community to join in. Another popular charity is the All Books for Children book drive (ABC).

Starbucks corporate contributions focus on literacy and education, AIDS outreach, environmental awareness, and the arts. Cash and product donations are made to non-profit organizations that partners serve as volunteers or board members.
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Starbucks has created “Green Teams”. Green Teams continuously review ways to reduce, reuse, recycle, and rethink environmental practices in their stores and roasting plants. Individual stores or partners receive the “Green Bean Award”, which is an award that recognizes superior performance in these efforts. One example is, instead of throwing away the coffee grounds Starbucks gives them away to customers to use in their garden. The grounds help with the amount of acidity in the ground, making their gardens very healthy.

In 1996, the Starbucks Foundation was created by Howard Schultz. The Foundation’s mission is to create hope, discovery, and opportunity in the communities where we live and work. It focuses on literacy for children and families. More than one hundred literacy grants were awarded in The Foundation’s first year. A very special feature of this program is the participation of Starbucks partners. The partners can sponsor grant applications to help local literacy groups.

Starbucks has joined with Guatemalan non-profit groups in a pilot program to evaluate working conditions in a coffee-producing region of Guatemala. There are four coffee growing regions that Starbucks gets their coffee from. They are Guatemala, Indonesia, Ethiopia, and Kenya. If the program is successful the other three regions will become part of the program. The long-term goal of this and other programs is to improve the circumstances of the people who cultivate, harvest, and process coffee beans. Starbucks is very committed to these origins. Buying coffee from these origins promotes conservation, organic farming, and economic stability. These are all very important issues that affect the people and the places that produce Starbucks coffee.

Starbucks is the largest direct corporate contributor to CARE, the international development and relief organization. The efforts are focused on literacy in the four coffee-growing regions of Indonesia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Guatemala, with special contributions in response to natural disasters. For example, Hurricane Mitch. Starbucks contributed, in response, to Hurricane Mitch. As of December 2002, Starbucks has contributed more than 1.4 million dollars to CARE.

A little more on conservation, Starbucks has partnered with Conservation International (CI) to support and enhance coffee production. This all begins with small farms in Chiapas, Mexico. The special interests are preserving traditional shade coffee farms in areas of high biodiversity and promoting ecologically sound practices in key tropical ecosystems.

In some coffee-origin countries, Starbucks pays a premium above the purchase price of coffee to fund local education and health projects which benefit coffee workers. These donations are jointly managed by Starbucks and by the local coffee partners---growers, millers, and exporters.

Starbucks tries to make a difference to the people and places that produce coffee, the countries and the families. The way they do business is very ethical. While giving to communities “here” and “there”, they encourage conservation in the areas where their coffee is grown. These and other ideas have increased Starbucks profits by more than 50%.


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