A small specialty coffee chain, known as World Coffee, Inc., is considering switching over to a 100% fair trade brew for its coffee and tea products.
World Coffee is a chain of eleven stores in the greater New York metropolitan area, with five in Manhattan, three in Brooklyn, two in Long Island, and one in Hoboken, New Jersey. The founder, Wendy Mueller, opened her first store in the trendy Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan in 2004 and quickly attracted a devoted following due to its use of extremely high-quality coffee, which was complemented with a 100% organic product line—organic milk and cream for the coffee and tea, organic sugar and honey as sweeteners, and pastries and baked goods made from 100% organic ingredients. Building on its initial success, the chain quickly expanded to its current size and each of its store operations is highly profitable. Wendy has a full-time executive staff of four people and the stores employ an additional ten store managers and fifty to sixty part-time employees.
A potential franchise partner from San Francisco, Blake Morton, has approached Wendy and is proposing opening an additional twenty to thirty stores in the western United States, especially in California, Oregon, and Washington.
However, her potential partner has proposed a significant change to World Coffee’s operations: They would switch over to 100% fair trade coffee and tea.
Wendy is concerned because she is aware that there has been a lot of criticism of fair trade as a system that promises more than it delivers. She is also concerned that the supply is more limited and that she will have to choose lower quality coffees. Additionally, she feels that it would be hard to source all her coffee from Fair Trade providers unless she raises her coffee prices by twenty-five to fifty cents per cup, and she was already worried that they were too high to begin with.
Despite this, Blake Morton s a vocal supporter of fair trade and is convinced that a 100% fair trade concept will help distinguish her from competitors and drive business to the store.
Wendy proposes that she and Blake research the topic and present their arguments to a jury composed of five people whom Wendy considers as New York’s top experts in running and expanding socially responsible businesses. Blake agrees to Wendy’s list and they both begin to prepare their arguments.
After reading the provided case, post about the ethical dilemma that you observe in it. Your response should address all of the following questions:
1. Who has the ethical dilemma to resolve?
2. Who are the key stakeholders to consider and how will they be impacted?
3. What provided information seems to be most relevant and important to making a decision?
4. What information is missing that one would want to know (in order to make an informed decision)?
5. What decisions COULD be made?
6. What potential consequences would there be for those decisions?
7. What would YOU do?
You are encouraged to apply the concepts of this module's content to your responses.