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January 27, 2005

A 3 buck cup of coffee?

The financial press has been all abuzz this week about Starbucks' earnings report- this quarter, pundits said, was when the chickens spawned by the coffee giant's global expansion were going to come home to roost. No one can sell the Italians and the French a $3.50 cup of American coffee, and Starbucks was going to find that out the hard way.

I know there's a lot of animus towards Starbucks on the web, generally. I don't share it. They're a big company that sells apparently decent coffee, though I'm not much of a coffee expert. I don't see how that ought to make them targets of derision. But the thing that always ticked me off about the conventional wisdom on Starbucks is that in reality the only reason Starbucks might not be able to sell the French a $3.50 cup of coffee is that the kind of Frenchman liable to find Starbucks attractive would find it too cheap for their tastes. Have the purveyers of the conventional wisdom never sat in French cafes? I've had multiple four dollar expressos in the most desirable places, much less 32 ounce caramel filled monstrosities. Starbucks' real challenge, I think, is convincing people accustomed to paying lots of money for location and prestige to pay lots of money for hopped up coffee. That may be a problem, but it's not at all the same thing as making cheapskates cough up more money - and when one remembers that both Starbucks and European cafes share the same salutory attribute of letting you putz around indefinitely once you've paid, the task becomes even less difficult.

That's why I wasn't surprised at all to find that Starbucks global sales are doing just fine. And I'll be even less surprised to see them continue to do well in the future. When you give people more of something for roughly the same price, they buy it. And it seems to be true in Europe too.


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Amar, Amar, Amar

Criminal Procedure, thus far, is like a tour back through my own Constitutional musings, only with the much-smarter-than-me Akhil Amar as the guide. To name just two past Crescat questions discussed in class today:

Q: What work does the treason clause do, and can the government punish the same conduct by a different name?

[Possible Answer: The same problem arises in the criminal/civil distinction, but it wouldn't be silly to suppose that sufficient social force applies to treason and criminality that even a name has meaning.]

Q: What would involuntary military service have to look like before it became involuntary servitude named in Amendment 13 (and forbidden for all but convicts)?

[Possible Answer: Well, universality, social status, and a reach that includes the privileged as well as the under-privileged are good points to distinguish our current system.]


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For Their Own Good

Phoebe Maltz questions the wisdom of uniquely requiring children to get consent from their parents or legal guardians before getting an abortion.

She points out (as I once argued) that pregnancy and motherhood are far more irreparable than abortion. [On the flip side, though, this begs the question of abortion's permissibility. If abortion = murder, then presumably the status of murderer (and the fetus's death) are irreparable harm too.]

In her comments Dan Moore raises the standard response-- since we require parental consent to children's medical procedures as a general rule, why make an exception for abortion?

Here's one possible reason: Abortion is uniquely an area where many people's judments about the desirability or undesirability of obtaining an abortion hinges on moral and religious beliefs rather than medical ones, so the regime that makes sense for chemotherapy and orthodontics may not make sense.

That said, of course non-utilitarian moral judgments creep into some other medical decisions-- from the Christian Scientists' to the question of vegetative states. But I suspect this is a much larger factor in many more abortion decisions, and I think it's unclear that parents should have the same right to force children to adhere to a controversial moral code they do not share as they have to force them to take their medicine.

These thoughts are indistinct and the lines are blurry (aren't all utilitarian or consequentalist judgments moral ones too? aren't all moral codes controversial to some degree?) but I hope they make some sense.


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