Health > coffee

I went to an interesting unconference on talent today at Electronic Arts. I was involved in a discussion on “the big pipe”: the need to reform the US education system so the country can have the talent necessary to thrive in the coming decades. One point we agreed on was the need for companies both to understand and lobby about the importance of education.

An executive from Starbucks made the excellent point that CEOs have a limited bandwidth for issues. For many, healthcare looms far larger than education. After all, she said, Starbucks spends more annually on employee healthcare than on purchasing coffee.

7 thoughts on “Health > coffee

  1. blah

    not surprising. The overwhelming cost for Starbucks is not the price of coffee, it is the price of rent. Prime real estate is called prime for a reason.

    Reply
  2. Allen Pike

    Well, it reminds you that Starbucks doesn’t really sell coffee, they sell a strongly branded, conveniently located set of services that might happen to use a small amount of coffee.

    Reply
  3. Shanti Braford

    Chad – should they arbitrarily spend more on coffee just so they can say they spend as much on Coffee as they do on Healthcare?

    btw – real communists should throw bricks through Starbucks windows not whine on blogs. =)

    Reply

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