Someday Café will CLOSE by August 15

[ron_newman]

I just came back from Someday, and confirmed the bad news. The café has not renewed its lease with the landlord (Chatham Light Realty), and the café's owner (Gus Rancatore, of Toscanini's ice cream) is disinclined to reopen it elsewhere in Davis Square. Unless someone changes his mind, the café must vacate by August 15, and most likely will close around August 1.

If you don't want this to happen, call Richard at Chatham Light, 617-354-4466 , and e-mail gus@tosci.com .

(for earlier discussion, see the post immediately below this one.)

[EDIT (6/27, 12:10 am): after exchanging e-mail and a phone call with Ian Judge, the manager of the Somerville Theatre, I have edited this post so that it no longer says that "the landlord is making them leave". Ian's statement is here. I'm going to leave the phone number and e-mail address in place; they came from a sign at the Someday's counter last night.]

Comments

[on-reserve.livejournal.com]

And yet they have had the largest POSITIVE influence on entry-level employee standards of any Fortune 500 company. Seriously. Name any big box store or fast food chain that offers: well-above minimum wage pay to start, health care for part time employees (with domestic partner benefits) and offers an exclusively fairly traded product (all Starbucks coffee is fair trade though it is not all "certified" under the fair trade organization). Go on, name one.

While Wal-Mart is paying people the least possible and cutting all healthcare benefits I'm personally glad that a ginormous company like Starbucks is setting trends the other way.

I wonder if Diesel pays their employees as much as Starbucks. I wonder if they offer full healthcare to part time workers. And I *know* that they didn't always offer fair trade coffee.

I'm not saying one is better than the other -- I'm saying there's room for both kinds of coffeehouses because they both serve very important and different purposes.

[karmaportrait.livejournal.com]

so they're the best of the worst.... that's positive i suppose. i just object to the monoculture of a starbucks every four blocks.

and i don't think they are different in purpose - they're both coffeehouses.

[on-reserve.livejournal.com]

If you are talking about making a "vote" with your money on the kind of community you want with your dollars then I think they do serve different purposes.

I want local independent business. So sometimes I "vote" that way.

I also want large, stable companies that behave ethically and with an eye toward social justice. So sometimes I "vote" that way.

Often small business doesn't have the clout or resources to do large-scale amounts of good or corporate culture shifting and lots of times large companies have a soul-sucking effect on the local landscape.

I'm saying they both add and subtract value from my coffeehouse experience and that I think that they can peacefully co-exist.

[androidqueen.livejournal.com]

amen.

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

Wordy McWord.

[maxroswell.livejournal.com]

Without a doubt, that's the most clear-headed thing I've read since this Someday/Starbucks brouhaha broke.

[dillonpuff.livejournal.com]

qft.

[on-reserve.livejournal.com]

Was your QFT (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoted_For_Truth) meant as agreement with my point or to keep me from changing my argument?

Just curious.

[dillonpuff.livejournal.com]

agreement

[mattdm [typekey.com] (from livejournal.com)]

(all Starbucks coffee is fair trade though it is not all "certified" under the fair trade organization)

Certification is important. Without it, there's no independent verification that the money really is going into the hands of farmers. Additionally, the claim "oh, we pay fair trade prices but didn't want to bother paying for the certification" often means that other issues critical to fair trade are ignored -- democratic decision making and right of free association, sustainable farming, child labor. If the coffee (or sugar, or bananas, or handicrafts -- fair trade isn't just for coffee!) is really fair trade, why NOT have it certified as such?

For what it's worth, somewhere under 5% of the coffee Starbucks buys is certified fair trade. That's still a lot of coffee in real terms, and you're right to commend them for the other good things they do.

Blue Shirt Cafe serves all fair-trade Equal Exchange coffee, but unfortuanately, it's not usually very good since they just brew it (poorly) and let it sit in a big cannister.

[violacat.livejournal.com]

Coming to this thread late, but some coffees can't be certified as fair-trade even though they are due to issues in the country of origin of said coffee.

At least, that's what I was taught when I worked at a small, independently owned coffeehouse. The owner wanted to have a large variety of coffees from various places available, and she did her best to have them all be fair-trade, but some just couldn't legally be labeled that way.