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Ever since Trader Joe’s replaced the inexpensive but wonderful whole bean New Mexican Piñon Coffee with the company’s ground version, I’ve all but stopped going to Trader Joe’s. Now, what was once an occasional purchase of premium brands such as Intelligentsia or Metropolis has become a pricey weekly habit.
I don’t know exactly what went wrong with the promotion, but my friend tells me she had to get rid of hundreds of cases of the stuff, which retails for $9.95 a pound. And I’m not going take this bit of info and try to extrapolate some sort of causality for SBUX’s well-publicized financial woes, but that is a tremendous amount of waste–enough to employ at least one barista for a year, or to fuel up the new corporate jet a few times. Or give Howard Schultz a couple more Hawaiian vacations.
