AboutCoffee(s).com

We have Tim Harford at Slate to thank for this one. It turns out that Starbucks ill serve you a better, stronger cappuccino if you want one, and they will charge you less for it. The drink in question is the elusive “short cappuccino”—at 8 ounces, a third smaller than the smallest size on the official menu, the “tall,” and dwarfed by what Starbucks calls the “customer-preferred” size, the “Venti,” which weighs in at 20 ounces and more than 200 calories before you add the sugar.

The short cappuccino has the same amount of espresso as the 12-ounce tall, meaning a bolder coffee taste, and also a better one. The World Barista Championship rules, for example, define a traditional cappuccino as a “five- to six-ounce beverage.” This is also the size of cappuccino served by many continental cafés. Within reason, the shorter the cappuccino, the better.

This secret cappuccino is also cheaper. So why does this cheaper, better drink along with the short latte and the short coffee unadvertised? The official line from Starbucks is that there is no room on the menu board, although this doesn’t explain why the short cappuccino is also unmentioned on the comprehensive Starbucks Web site.

According to Slate, economics has the answer. This is the Starbucks way of sidestepping a painful dilemma over how high to set prices. Price too low and the margins disappear; too high and the customers do. Any business that is able to charge one price to price-sensitive customers and a higher price to the rest will avoid some of that awkward trade-off.

The practice is hundreds of years old. The French economist Emile Dupuit wrote about the early days of the railways, when third-class carriages were built without roofs, even though roofs were cheap: “What the company is trying to do is prevent the passengers who can pay the second-class fare from traveling third class; it hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich.”

Starbucks’ gambit is much simpler and more audacious: Offer the cheaper product but make sure that it is available only to those customers who face the uncertainty and embarrassment of having to request it specifically. Fortunately, the tactic is easily circumvented: If you’d like a better coffee for less, just ask. Check out the original article here.

Perky Cups, the Aurora, Colorado coffee shop that became famous because of it’s bikini-adorned employees, was forced to close its doors recently. According to a local publication, the Aurora Sentinal, the building’s owners  evicted the owner Jason Bernal for nonpayment of rent, and for failure to abide by the terms of his lease, including having bikini clad baristas operating outside of the shop’s premises and having signage that isn’t allowed, said Greg Coleman, president of Coldwell Banker Commercial in Denver, the shop’s landlord.

Perky Cups coffee shop has been mired in controversy since March when a 10-foot-by-20-foot sign featuring a woman in a bikini sprung up in front of the shop and resulted in a heated First Amendment debate. The store then began receiving criticisms in April from people who were irked and unimpressed when the store’s employees began their Wednesday ritual of selling hot dogs in their bikinis outside of the coffee shop.

Coffee Shop Heating System Not Repaired

“There was an order granted for possession by the court, and the sheriff showed up yesterday and locked the premises,” he said. “Now it’s back in the landlord’s possession.”  Coleman said he could not specify how much money Bernal owes. “We can make no further comment because of the pending lawsuit.” No court dates have been scheduled yet. Bernal said he is relieved that the store was closed, citing numerous problems with the landlord and property manager for the past several months. He is accusing the landlord of not reparing the shop’s heating system for 45 days during November and December of last year.  and he did not pay rent because he lost about $50,000 in revenue because of the heating dilemma, he said. “The management knew what our company was and then when they started receiving complaints, (they) changed their tune.”

Local councilwoman Molly Markert and at least 30 other people signed a petition in May to boycott Perky Cups and the surrounding businesses in the shopping center. Reportedly, Markert said in a letter to the shop’s property manager that she was imposing an economic boycott of the businesses until Bernal’s employees stopped parading outside of the shop in their bikinis.

If you are a lone coffee drinker in your home, or are looking for an alternative to the office coffee situation, you should consider going with K Cup coffee. The K Cup coffee system is a single cup coffee brewing system that does away with the idea that an entire pot of coffee be made at a time.

A team of wacky scientists from BBC1’s “Bang Goes the Theory” TV show, have converted a 1988 Volkswagen Scirocco into a coffee-powered car, nicknamed Car-puccino.

As revolutionary as this concept sounds, it’s more of a fun project than a cost-efficient one. The idea behind Car-puccino is relatively simple: coffee, like wood or coal, has traces of carbon in it, so it burns. Use a bucket load of coffee, heat it enough to break it down into hydrogen and carbon monoxide, direct the gases towards the engine, and you’ve got yourself a running vehicle.

That sounds easy enough, but there is a down-side to using coffee as fuel. First of all, it’s between 25 and 50 times more expensive than petrol. Car-puccino is schedule to journey 210 miles, from Manchester to London, and the team estimates it will burn through 70 kilos of coffee. Multiply that by 13-26 British pounds per kilo (depending on the quality and brand) and you get some pretty big numbers. Plus, Car-puccino will have to pull over every 60 miles or so, so the crew can clean up the filters of tar.

Pretty original idea, but I doubt we’ll ever see Car-puccino go into production. I wonder what the exhaust fumes smell like, though…Espresso?

Well, you can give your cup of coffee to this car and it’ll drink it up! It may sound extraordinary, but this car does run on coffee. It costs around 25 to 50 times more to get this car up and running compared to a petrol powered car. So, it isn’t really an alternative. Christened as the “Car-puccino”, this £400 modified 1988 Volkswagen Scirocco will be driven 210 miles between Manchester and London powered by roasted coffee granules. Built by a team known as Bang Goes The Theory, the car will be unveiled at the Big Bang science fair in Manchester. The Carpuccino will go three miles per kilo of ground coffee, which totals up to about 56 espressos per mile. 70 kilos of ground coffee costing between £910 and £1,820 will be used for this journey.

Every 30 to 45 miles, the team will fill it up with more granules. Owing to the stops and despite its 60mph speed, the car will take 10 hours to complete this journey at the cost of 11,760 espressos.

Here’s a statistic that may surprise you. Despite the long-term success that Starbucks has enjoyed, they have less than 10 percent share of coffee consumption in North America, and less than 1 percent share internationally. At least that’s the case according to Starbucks Chairman, President and CEO Howard Schultz. And recently, it has been pointed out that despite Starbucks being the world’s largest coffeehouse chain with more than 13,000 locations in more than 50 countries, even its most devout customers purchase only three of every 10 cups of coffee they drink from Starbucks.

According to CNN Money, Folgers – a division of J.M. Smucker Co., is still the largest producer of retail packaged coffee in the United States. Its coffee brands include Folgers and Millstone, and it also manufactures and distributes Dunkin’ Donuts coffee to sell in grocery stores, and there is the other American coffee titan, Maxwell House, which is a Kraft Foods brand.  An AC Nielsen panel recently found that more than 11 percent of American households purchase flavored coffee for home use, making it a $265 million business in the United States.

It appears as though the home brew coffee market is still by far the largest market share. This realization has coffee giant Starbucks stepping up its home brew strategy, partially by adding some flavor. This month Starbucks Corp. introduces Starbucks Natural Fusions brand. Flavored coffees in vanilla, caramel and cinnamon, soon to be seen on grocery store shelves.

Additionally, Starbucks wants to capture a larger share of the U.S. brewed coffee market by leaning on its VIA Ready Brew line and Seattle’s Best coffee brand to increase the number of distribution points. Starbucks acquired its former competitor, Seattle’s Best Coffee, seven years ago.

On May 19, 2010 The Consumer Product Safety Commission announced a recall of approximately 900,000 GE 12-cup digital coffee makers sold exclusively at Walmart stores nationwide, after dozens of reports of overheating, smoking, burning and fires. According to the CPSC, Walmart has received reportedly received 83 complaints about the GE-branded coffee maker, including overheating, smoking, melting, burning and fire, including three reports of minor burn injuries to consumer’s hands, feet and torso. Reports of property damage include a significant kitchen fire and damage to countertops, cabinets and a wall.

The coffee makers, with the GE logo printed on the base, were sold in white or black from March 2008 through January of this year. The model numbers involved are 169164 and 169165. Consumers are advised to immediately stop using these coffee makers and return them to any Walmart for a full refund.

Designer Heo Jeong Im has created a “coffee stick” that is essentially a stir stick, with what looks like a dehydrated coffee solution wrapped around it. The idea is that you stir this coffee stick into hot water and presto, you have a cup of coffee.

The coffee sticks would come in various options including Cappuccino and Americano. When you place the stick in a cup and stir with hot water, a coffee drink is created.

Speakin for myself, as a coffee drinker I like to  avoid the “manufactured” and are more likely to try to get as close to the raw product and direct to the source as possible. I couldn’t see myself replacing my drip brew with a stick.

While it does look trendy, this device would be an eco nightmare if mass produced. First of all there is the concern about the waste around natural goods into factory created products. (i.e. bottled water) Secondly, what happens to the stirrer after consumption? Throw it in the garbage? Wouldn’t a reusable spoon do the job better?

The “coffee on a stick” was featured on Yanko design.

Back in 1991, when the World Wide Web was little more than a pipe dream, some technicians at The University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory were working on ATM networks and related research. Consisting of poor academics, the team of about 15 people only had one coffee machine and as you could imagine the hard working technicians went through a lot of coffee, and when a pot was brewed it did not last very long.

Some members of the team resided in parts of the building where they had to navigate several flights of stairs to get to the coffee pot, a journey that could prove to be an exercise in futility when someone else had emptied the pot. This disruption to the progress of Computer Science research obviously caused us some distress, and so XCoffee was born.

The students had access to several racks of simple computers used for reasarch, and one of them  had a video frame-grabber attached and was not being used at the time.  The impoverished hackers fixed a camera to a retort stand, pointed it at the coffee machine in the corridor, and ran the wires under the floor to the frame-grabber.

One of the technicians then wrote a ’server’ program, which ran on that machine and captured images of the pot every few seconds at various resolutions, and another wrote a ‘client’ program which everybody could run, which connected to the server and displayed a greyscale, icon-sized image of the pot in the corner of the screen, that was updated approximately 3 times per minute. The researchers have said  “This system only took us a day or so to construct but was rather more useful than anything else I wrote while working on networks. It also made a better topic of conversation at dinner parties than ATM protocols.”

The first published record of XCoffee came when Bob Metcalfe wrote about it in Comm Week on 27th January 1992 after visiting the lab, and inspired by this success, there was talk of other monitoring applications using low-frame-rate video. Systems such as XSandwichVan and XPrinterOutputTray were mooted. Eventually, the frame grabber died until one day two technicians named Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson resurrected the system, treated it to a new frame grabber, and made the images available on the World Wide Web.

Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have looked at the coffee pot, making it undoubtedly the most famous in the world.

Sadly, the Trojan Room Coffee machine was finally switched off at 0954 UTC on Wednesday 22nd August 2001.

The final image, which shows the server being switched off, is here, however, the Trojan Room Coffee Pot web page still exists. Visit http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html

What if you were sipping coffee with Robert De Niro? At least that’s what a fan paid in a star-studded charity auction in New York on Thursday night. The star of  hits like Taxi Driver, Heat, Meet The Parents [plus many more] offered an outing to a coffee shop as a lot An unnamed bidder pounced on the prize and paid thousands of dollars for a coffee with the star.

The sale raised money for the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, also saw a pair of tickets to Sir Elton John’s next Oscars party auctioned for $52,500. A visit to the set of hit TV show Mad Men sold for $24,000 and a fedora hat worn by Harrison Ford in the Indiana Jones movie series fetched $19,500, according to the New York Daily News.

There may not be a Starbucks on every corner any more, but customers are finding their way back into the upscale coffee retailer’s stores. The company recently boosted its forecast for 2010 after the coffee retailer announced that its profit surged in the quarter that ended March 28, topping Wall Street forecasts.

Over the past two years, Starbucks cut costs by closing hundreds of stores, trimming its workforce, overhauling its food menu and adjusting drink prices. The changes finally took hold last quarter, when the company reported a profit that quadrupled its earnings from a year earlier.

The world’s largest coffee chain reported earnings of $217.3 million, or 28 cents per share. Stripping out restructuring charges, Starbucks posted an adjusted profit of 29 cents per share.Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters, who typically exclude one-time items from their forecast, were looking for earnings of 25 cents per share.

Sales jumped 9% to $2.5 billion, beating analysts’ expectations of $2.4 billion.

Full story http://money.cnn.com/2010/04/21/news/companies/Starbucks_earnings/