Blog.

We conclude our short series highlighting Bryant Simon’s book, in EVERYTHING BUT THE COFFEE: Learning about America from Starbucks (University of California Press, 2009).

Bryant writes how early on in his research he was supportive of Starbucks against its detractors complaining of Starbucks bigness and sameness. However, his attitude changed. He calls it his “Rwandan moment.”

In an email exchange, I asked Bryant what happened during his “Rwandan moment” causing him to go from being sympathetic to Starbucks to somewhat critical of Starbucks. He replied…

BRYANT SIMON: Before I started my research, I found Starbucks to be an interesting place, most notably a potentially important public gathering spot in suburbanizing America. But the deeper I dug into the company’s history and charted its actions and located it within the context of the changes in American society, the more skeptical I became about the promises it made. My patience with the company snapped when I learned about its behavior (both the promises it made and its deeper indifference to what was actually going on) in Rwanda.

Rwanda, as most people know, has had a mean and bloody past. Ethnic violence in the mid-1990s cost the nation, a former colony with a woefully underdeveloped economy and infrastructure, hundreds of thousands of lives. By 2000, the country was trying to get back on its feet and the coffee industry had the potential to help it and some of its farmers recover. Starbucks, it turned out, played on this history and this guilt – a western guilt over doing nothing to stop the killing – to sell some pricey coffee and make itself look better.

In 2005, Starbucks introduced Rwanda Blue Bourbon with its “subtle acidity” and “herbal, spice, and cocoa notes” as one of its “Black Apron Exclusives” – the designation it uses for its highest-end, most expensive specialty coffees. “Taste a special coffee,” an in-store sign maintained, “that’s helping transform farmers lives.” “A Promising Future in Every Pound,” a company press release announced to mark the introduction of Rwanda Blue Bourbon. “Following the devastating events of 1994“ – a store sign proclaimed and this was all it said about the country’s troubling past – “this new cash crop (coffee) has given Rwandan farmers hope for a better future and helped them afford better education, medicine, and housing.”

These signs – again promises – got me interested in what Starbucks was actually doing in Rwanda. I asked around a bit and found out that while Starbucks charged $22/per pound for its coffee, it wasn’t paying any more at origin than other roasters buying Rwandan beans from small growers and charging consumers far less. Starbucks, moreover, wasn’t buying its bean from co-ops or small farmers, at least not directly. “These are plantation beans,” one source who knew something about the Rwandan coffee industry commented when I asked him about Starbucks purchases. When I asked him what he meant by this, he curtly answered, “I meant what I said.” Starbucks was buying beans from large shareholders, not small farmers, from powerful landowners with, in many cases, ties to old colonial authorities, not from the victims of the ethnic cleaning campaigns that ripped the country apart.

But the Starbucks’ promises, again, made it seem like it was helping the least fortunate (not lining the pockets of people who never stopped getting decent educations, adequate health care, and spacious accommodations.)

So this was my Rwandan moment. To me, this was just too much. Manipulating the Rwandan tragedy to make money seemed totally out of bounds and nearly unethical. But even more, it demonstrated to me the utter ordinariness of Starbucks. It wasn’t that the company was exceptionally nefarious or greedy; it was that the company just like any other company, was willing to do just about anything and say just about anything to move product.