Month: March 2012

In 1966, Alfred Peet opened his first coffee shop at the corner of Vine & Walnut in Berkeley, Calif. It’s still there, 46 years later. A lovely store with dark wood, a distinctly neighborhood feel, and an unpretentious atmosphere, the original Peet’s Coffee has arguably had the single most important impact in coffee drinking in the US in the last 50 years, and possibly around the world.

Why? Because it inspired Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gordon Bowker (all friends of Alfred Peet) to open a small coffee shop of their own up in Seattle. You may have heard of it.

Founded in 1971, Starbucks is “the largest coffeehouse company in the world,” says Wikipedia. Though it’s grown much faster than Peet’s, Starbucks was modeled on that original café in Berkeley, especially its style of dark-roasted drip coffee. Currently there are more than 17,000 Starbucks stores around the world, according to the company’s website. So although it’s true that people have been drinking coffee for 500 years, I think it’s fair to say that the way we think about coffee today is how Starbucks taught us to think about it.

But that may start to change. Continue reading “After 50 Years, a Small Revolution in Coffee”

Buried in a recent article in The Wall Street Journal was an interesting point about the insight of two women who served in leadership roles at the Fed prior to the financial crisis. The point was a subtle one, and it appeared only at the end of the article. You could easily gloss over it.

What the article seems to suggest is that, in contrast to a group of men who may have been clouded by miscalculations (and hubris), women at the Fed demonstrated better foresight and greater caution with regard to the US economy.

And it got me thinking: Would the US economy have fallen less – or rebounded sooner – if the Federal Reserve were run by a woman? Continue reading “Why the Next Fed Chairman Should be a Chairwoman”