[mburbank]

Protos here.

The donut guy died, but he retired first. Anyway, I think he died.

I'm sorry about your coffee shop. Mine (FRONT STREET COFFEE OF SALEM MASS) serves up several varieties of Fair Trade Coffee from all over the world every day (fair trade negotiates directly with growers and pays a living wage) AND it costs literally half what Starbucks does, plus all your various espresso varieties. I stop there every morning on the way to the train.

Starbucks has excellent employee practices, but they use a targetting strategy for where they start up and take a loss until they drive local competition out of business, just like Walmart. Plus, their coffee is WAY to damn expensive and all you're paying for is the snooty ambience. I have no problem with a Starbucks on the highway or in a town that has no good coffee, but when they plunked their ass down within walking distnce of five, count em five private shops and two DD's in Salem I wanted to set them on fire.