Author: CRT Admin

A recent story in the Wall Street Journal deserves our attention.

It reports on how a company – Starbucks – famous and once very profitable – can’t just float on the tides of capitalism, but must work for its money by taking care of stakeholders.

As I have asked students in my MBA classes on business ethics, “What is a company without customers?”

The students almost always show some surprise in their faces – thinking perhaps that “Of course companies have customers.  It’s a capitalist system.”

Then, I pause and answer my own questions: “Bankrupt.”

The students immediately get the point: in capitalism, you have to attract customers in order to profit.  No one directs them to spend their money in your store.

So, to prove my point, here are excerpts from the reporting of Heather Haddon:

In late summer, a customer started showing up at Los Angeles-area cafes at all hours of the day, quizzing baristas about their favorite drinks to make, or problems with how the stores operated.

Starbucks’s challenges have mounted this year and deepened since Niccol assumed leadership in early September.  The company in October reported that U.S. transactions fell for a third consecutive quarter, while earnings and revenue for its most recent quarter undershot analysts’ estimates.  It scrapped its fiscal-year financial forecasts. 

Niccol has said Starbucks needs to be clear-eyed about its problems and move quickly to make customer-friendly changes—such as bringing back Sharpies for handwritten notes on cups, and possibly reinstating newspapers for those who linger in cafes.  When he announced last week that self-service condiment bars would come back to stores next year, some lapsed customers said they would return. 

Donald Trump has just been re-elected president of the United States, but with nearly half the American people voting against him.  As of this writing and somewhat surprising to me, is that Trump’s Republican Party has elected enough senators to take majority control of the Senate.

The recent campaigns reveal a deeply divided American people.  There are lessons here to be learned and multiple conflicting discourses to assess.

Seeking to expand the availability of heterodox discourse, Alpha News, a very small start-up source of news here in Minnesota, has produced a moving documentary looking at a fault line among Americans – the ethical quality of our police.

For many, the police are racist in their interactions with minorities, especially with African American men.  For others, the police are necessary to protect families and neighborhoods against violence and criminal trespasses on the vulnerable and the innocent.

In Minnesota recently, 5 police and firemen have been killed in trying to do their duty.  Alpha News believed that telling their stories and bringing forward to the public the grief of their families would provide more perspective to voters in this time of disagreement and intolerance of the views of others.

For some, this documentary – Minnesota v. We the People – brings out feelings of compassion and respect as emotional responses to individual sacrifices made that the community might be more safely livable and supportive.

For others, it may not be so welcomed and so be perceived as too one-sided in its appreciation of policing.

The producer of the documentary, Liz Collin, received our Dayton Award for 2023 for her courage and leadership in making an earlier documentary commenting unfavorably on the trial of police officer Derek Chauvin for murder in the death of George Floyd, when Floyd was in the custody of officer Chauvin and other members of the Minneapolis Force and protest riots breaking out in response to his death in police custody.

Criminality is everywhere a human failing.  Policing, rightly done, is everywhere a human social asset.  Discourse everywhere facilitates both our becoming aware of our failings and our seeking betterment in our lives.

By sharing this documentary, we hope to provide you with a discourse worthy of reflection on how we, in every country, city, town and village, should meet our need for security of self and others and for providing respect for self and others.

You may watch the documentary here.

Ten years ago, some Peruvian farmers started growing blueberries for export.  They wanted to compete with growers in Chili for “profits.”  Imported berries sold in the U.S. in the cold months when they don’t grow there command high prices.

In 2013, Peruvians earned about $17 million in sales.  In 2023, their income from exporting blueberries was $1.7 billion.  A lot of Peruvian families and workers were better off.  Today, Peru exports more than its competitors, reports The Economist:

Innovation made this happen.  Shades of Adam Smith and creating the pin factory to make more pins and sell them for lower prices so that users of pins, those who wore the clothes they made, factory workers and factory owners, all saw a rise in their well-being.

Peruvians took from inventors in the U.S. new varieties of blueberries which did not need chilly winters and which could thrive on Peru’s coast.  By 1922, the yield of the typical Peruvian blueberry field was nearly double the global average, giving Peruvian growers and their customers a cost advantage.

The provision of public goods also lifted production and private wealth creation – tax breaks and irrigation megaprojects to bring coastal desert land into cultivation.

But as often happens with free markets, competitors join the party.  “Colombia, Morocco, everyone is growing blueberries now,” said one farmer in Peru.