Starbucks.

Well, for a long time I've been thinking about chai lattes.  I'm a tea drinker, I haven't drank a cup of coffee in over a decade or an espresso of any description in a few years, so my life is pretty basic.  But I do enjoy the occasional chai latte from Starbucks.  I've had a few chai lattes from other establishments (namely Frankly Coffee in Kamloops), that have been just as excellent, but I often find that the mix of ingredients that makes up the chai base doesn't suit my tastes.  But the Starbucks one does.

So as I've attempted to stop using products that are not reusable, Starbucks has slowly fallen from my list of occasional indulgences.  Either I forget my travel mug, and I don't have time to stay and drink from a ceramic mug, or I just forget to tell them that I want a ceramic mug and then they give me my drink in a to go cup, or any combination of the foregoing, and I feel the environmental guilt.  Also, I morally have a bit of a problem with Starbucks because I don't think they do as good of a job as they can of being responsible for the vast quantities of paper cups that they send drinks out in, knowing they won't be recycled.

Almost everyone has the ability to bring a travel mug with them when they buy a coffee, but they don't because there's no incentive.  I firmly believe that Starbucks (and all coffee houses, for that matter), should charge a premium for convenience cups (i.e. and extra dollar, for instance), which will give everyone an incentive to go ahead and make the extra effort to bring a mug.  They could even charge the extra dollar then refund it to customers when they bring them back, then recycle them, which is what happens for the most part with glass milk bottles.  All I'm saying is that they need to take responsibility for their products even after they've left their coffee shops.  That is a basic tenet of corporate social responsibility that many companies are lacking.