Now That’s Good Coffee! Will Starbucks Profits Predict Economic Recovery?

Do you remember a few months back when I wrote about the Starbucks Index? The basic gist was this: “In his February 19, 2009 editorial entitled ‘Starbucks becomes a harbinger of the economy.”

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A Little Spring in Our Steps

For six months or so, in the eye of the worst economic contraction of my lifetime, businesses and forecasters have been declaring the recession over. Regardless of layoffs and spending freezes, experts and non-experts alike stated with great clarity that all was well.

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The Starbucks Index

You can study common economic indicators like the GDP, CPI, inflation, deflation, housing markets, unemployment or bull and bear markets to determine if our economy is heading in the right direction, but I prefer to take a different tack. Perhaps you could call it the “Main Street” approach as opposed to the “Wall Street” approach to analyzing the hopeful economic rebound.

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Attitude Adjustment

Our attitudes control our lives. Attitudes are a secret power working 24 hours a day, for good or bad. It is of paramount importance that we know how to harness and control this great force. « Irving Berlin, composer and lyricist (1888 – 1989)
Brace yourselves. It is going to happen. Things are going to get better. While I am well aware of the doom and gloom constantly being
reported on both network and cable news—that 2009 is just going to continue the economic slide—I have decided to toss the fear aside and take a different approach to the new year. This is

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A Room of Her own

“A woman must have money and a room of her own.” – VIRGINIA WOOLF
Now it’s time to get creative, economically speaking. When living inside a sliding economy, one where the media delivers more bad news with every passing day, it is impossible not to feel a responsibility to tighten up on spending.
So one day in the not-so-distant past, while I was driving home from work in my gas-guzzling SUV, I was challenged by an economic strategist on the radio. He explained that we care for our bodies through exercise, so why wouldn’t we do the same for our wallets. I decided

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