Spare-a-Dime, Lost: A Tale of Reusable Perfidy

It's been a long time -- nearly a year in fact -- since I have blogged anything about SBX, and their efforts to be green. Today I rise to gripe about the Personal Cup Overcharge.

Thanks to a work colleague's thoughtfulness over the winter holidays, I started using a reusable insulated mug for coffee from the mer-girl's place in 2007. I drink more of their coffee than I should, and the exhortations of Anna at Bring Your Own and the "Coffee Cup Waste Calculator" link on the temporarily defunct Noreen's Five Percent convinced me, when this windfall fell my way, that I should stop using paper for my coffee.

In addition to it being a good thing from an enviro perspective, there is a 10 cent discount for bringin' your own.

Except today I noticed that the register girl rang up my drink at the full price. And I realized, in retrospect, that this had been happening a lot.

Now, even if I drank two mocha's every single day (and I'm not quite that bad), still that amounts to a little over $70 a year. Not earth shattering, but I wouldn't toss $70 all at once in the trash if you handed it to me either.

Then it occurred to me that this may happen hundreds, or even thousands of times a year! And given the millions of cups o'joe-to-go that SBX sells -- well egad! -- that could be thousands of ill-gotten dimes falling negligently into the mermaid's coffers . . . and out of customers pockets.

Frankly, it screams class action to me. (Wicked grin.) And if there is a good, struggling lawyer out there looking for an interesting case, let's chat.

Meanwhile, I think I will have a chat with SBX brass and see if they are interested in earmarking those dimes for some worthy cause or something -- just to do the right thing.

Oh, and I will keep using the reusable cup: The cup calculator says that our mythical coffee addict would use 45 pounds of paper cups in a year. Yikes!

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Amused by the Starbucks Challenge? Me too. Now come see my real mission in the blogosphere: Easy Green and its companion journal, Observations, and such: Notes on the Kitchen Calendar