if there's one thing i love it's an argument taken out of context.

you're right, my local coffee shop, and most local businesses, cannot afford to give benefits to their workers. i might view this as all the more reason to support such mom and pop endeavors (in the hopes that one day they might be able to provide them), but since that's woefully optimistic and not even what's being debated, i'll leave that one alone for now.

what i'd like to comment on, then, is this: "seriously parse through how much more you're paying for fair trade coffee even there, and then work out how much more per pound the farmers are actually getting. If you get lucky, you might be getting 50% of your money to the farmer."

i mean, i know it feels better to spout off arbitrary numbers and statistics without having to provide any context with which to make sense of them, but 50% of the money to the farmers is pretty ******* great when you consider the alternative, non-fair trade percentages. additionally, i think even the farmers would expect that packaging, transportation, grinding, brewing, selling, etc. are going to take a chunk out of their profit. do they expect 100%? i gurarantee that no one else at any stage of the game is getting anywhere near 50%, so what's the problem?

and while it actually is a great thing that starbucks provides benefits (and i don't remember that we were even debating starbucks, necessarily), on the whole the poverty of the average american barista who lacks benefits is the american dream (i.e. two standard deviations away from the poverty) of the average coffee farmer.

i hate to have to choose a side, but give me the farmer everytime.