From coffee beans to bailouts

Wow, here’s a newsflash — Starbucks is responding to the weak economy and its slowed sales growth with a new emphasis on retaining customers, cutting costs and promoting the value of its products. This is the same promise the Big Three auto manufacturers are pitching to Congress to get their multi-billion dollar bailout loan.

Call me stupid, but isn’t that what every company should have as its business model regardless of the economy? It’s about time the greed and glut of big business is exposed. It’s unfortunate that a byproduct of this is people having to lose their jobs or take pay cuts for companies to survive.

But if we (that means you in big business) use this as an opportunity, it could spark another revolution (one of a positive nature). The United States has become a country that is overfed, overweight, overconsumed, overbenefited, overgovernmented and overbearing; and now we’re paying for it. As current companies with failed business models go under, opportunities for new businesses will be created, ones that will need to be more innovative and productive, that will create jobs and actually produce something that will make the world a better place.

So as we all tighten our belts to ride out the current recession, there is at least one good thing that’s happened with the economy being the way it is. We can now drive our cars and trucks for half the cost of what we did last year. .

Who would have thought back then that you would be able to buy a gallon of gas for half the price of a Starbucks latte?