If Only We Could Spill A Starbuck On Our Lap

RECHARGER WANTS TO HUG THE QUEENS WOMAN suing Starbucks because they wouldn’t honor her free drink coupon. When Kelly Coakley, 23, took the coupon to one of the coffee empire’s outlets in Queen, she was told it was no longer valid. So she did exactly what Starbucks did when it didn’t like a lowly cartoonist who, some years back, created a Starbucks logo parody—she sued, for $114 million—the approximate cost of one coffee a day for all the people with defunct coupons. Starbucks originally e-mailed the coupon to employees, telling them to forward it to family and friends. “Baxter,” we love to imagine Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz screaming into his coffee-cup-shaped intercom, “do you know how much free coffee we have to give away, you dolt!!” Hmm, 10,000 employees with 100 family and friends multiplied by $9.23—or whatever a Starbucks “tall” (that’s the teeny-weeny size) goes for…not enough as far as we’re concerned. Starbucks, with revenues of $10 billion in 2006, with 125,000 employees, with 11,784 outlets worldwide (including one that opened yesterday in Recharger’s living room), with a history of union-busting, with the balls to sue a small indigenous café on the remote island of Haida Gwaii because it called itself “Haidabucks,” with the cojones to brainwash its 125,000 employees into calling themselves “barristas,” absolutely needs this lawsuit.

– Ricky Sit