Today, Starbucks is a Far-Flung Empire with 2000 Outlets Worldwide
David Weigel | May 30, 2006, 9:20am
In USA Today, Bruce Horovitz has a report on Starbucks that makes no small claims. The coffee chain, simply put, is changing America.
Starbucks has a [glitzy] goal: to help rewrite society's pop culture menu. The company that sells 4 million coffee drinks daily in the USA is hot to extend its brand beyond the espresso machine to influence the films we see, CDs we hear and books we read. In the process, it aims to grow into a global empire rivaling McDonald's.
One of those world-changing initiatives is the chain's sale of fair trade coffee, about which more can be read in Kerry Howley's already-classic March 2006 Reason feature. But the other Starbucks innovations include "changing what we'll pay for coffee, changing coffee tastes, changing what we eat, changing how we order, changing how people meet, changing cities," and playing a big role in the music industry. (I guess Antigone Rising are going nowhere but down, but the rest of Starbucks in-store CDs have proven pretty influential.) Some consumers are welcoming the changes; others, as evidenced by this Fark thread (with obligatory Battlestar Galactica references), are more skittish.
ralphus | May 30, 2006, 6:08pm | #
Let's do a quick Google News search for "soccer match violence" and "football match violence" shall we? Ooh what have we here?
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May 19, 2006
Sierra Leone: Aftermath of Soccer Match: Let's Put a Stop to Hooliganism
"It is rather strange that violence has become so synonymous with soccer these days that hardly does a week passes by without hearing of any incidence of this satanic practice."
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May 30,2006
Shocker for EFCC - 1 feared dead in Jos
"One soccer fan was feared dead in Jos Sunday during a league match between Mighty Jets of Jos and visiting FC Abuja."
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May 30, 2006
Argentine police will watch hooligans in Germany
"The Argentine government will send ten Federal Police officers to Dusseldorf, Germany, on Sunday, to watch "barra brava" (fight club) members expected to go to Germany from across Argentina, local media said Monday."
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May 25, 2006
Crowds well behaved for Socceroos
"THE 95,000 crowd that watched Australia defeat Greece by 1-0 in a pre-World Cup friendly soccer match tonight were mainly well behaved, police say. Senior Constable Wayne Wilson warned violence could still erupt as thousands of fans remained inside the MCG and nearby carpark, but no major incidents occurred during the match."
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May 15, 2006
Berlin: Hooligans clash, police watch
"A 1,000-man police force failed to prevent violence between hooligans at a soccer match in Berlin, Germany."
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May 30, 2006
Schmid pledges security drive
"Switzerland's sports minister Samuel Schmid has expressed the view that additional measures will be necessary to combat hooliganism ahead of UEFA EURO 2008™."
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May 30, 2006
Known hooligans surrender passports
"Thousands of known England football hooligans are handing their passports over to police today ahead of the nationwide, Fifa-backed, World Cup banning order deadline."
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May 15, 2006
Basel face stiff penalties over match violence
"The Swiss Football League (SFL) says it is ready to impose "severe" penalties on Basel after hundreds of the club's supporters went on the rampage following Saturday's title decider."
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Hackneyed joke - yes. Accurate stereotype - yes.
But, I don't blame soccer fans. If I just sat through a 90 minute, 0-0 blue-ball fest I'd want to punch somone and set fire to a Peugeot too.
Timon19 | May 30, 2006, 9:05pm | #
Citing a story from Sierra Leone is a big helping of missing the point. They've been warring for years now. The fact that sport is proxy for politics and genocide has nothing to do with the nature of the game itself.
I imagine the fact that a truce was called Ivory Coast's civil war in order to celebrate their qualification is something you didn't find.
Fact is, if tiddlywinks, bocce, field hockey, Ultimate Fighting, lacrosse, or whatever the fuck you want had been the national sport of most of the nations where there HAS been violence, you'd be saying the same bullshit about them.
The violence stems from cultural, political and especially ethnic tensions. Sport is a forum and a proxy battleground for these tensions. It's where the (sometimes literally) warring parties meet. The fact that it happens at soccer matches is ancillary.
As for your other stories: #2 involves another West African nation known for its civil war, #3 talks about the (vastly overhyped) fears of hooliganism at the World Cup - because of past violence, authorities put out scary press releases about cracking down; it is very rare for something to happen at the World Cup (btw, "barra brava" doesn't mean "fight club" anywhere I can find).
#4, nothing happened. This despite the fact that there is a huge Greek immigrant population in Oz and there's a recent history of major tensions and violence against the Lebanese community and other immigrant communities (including Balkans and Greeks) completely unrelated to soccer.
#5, no context, but perhaps your first legitimate citation. That said, Berlin and Germany at large have a similar, but lower-level set of immigrant issues as France.
#6, so the Swiss sports minister is talking of stepped-up security ahead of a major event. Never heard of that before in the US. This is no different than any major tournament. Politicians know the perception of hooliganism. They try to sound tough. Yay.
#7, this has been going on since the problems in the '70s and '80s. England has brought their domestic problem very much under control, mostly due to pricing out the groups most likely to fight: pissed-off youths. They've banned known hooligans for ages from traveling. Again, these guys get a rush out of fighting in public. Nothing's more public than a big match. It has precious little to do with a particluar sport.
#8, hey, another real example! Tell me, how often does the NCAA fine the living shit out of Ohio State or Maryland or wherever after the students rampage?
Point is, thousands of professional matches come off each and every week without a problem. This despite the massive stage this particular sport commands and provides for long-held political and ethnic grudges or social battles.
The critics are right about one thing: in most other nations, the propensity for real organized violence is more likely higher elsewhere than in the US. The US also has one of the highest rates of assimilation and ethnic mixing in the world, if not THE highest. People, by and large, get along.
None of the forgoing is going to budge any of the people for whom what was mentioned above represents a different picture from what they are convinced soccer is about. Their minds are made up.
And here I am thinking posters here were mostly immune to that sort of thinking.
