the audit

Breaking: 4 Minute Wait for Decaf at Starbucks

January 28, 2009

Talk about commodity news.

We’ve gotten on the Journal before for its weird Starbucks obsession obsession, but today it goes overboard again.

It reports that Starbucks is going to stop brewing decaffeinated coffee in the afternoons, forcing those who ask for it to wait a whole four minutes for their drink. Break out the siren, Drudge!

Okay, it’s an anecdote of the cost cuts dripping through the economy, but not one that needed its own story, and certainly not one that deserves to be placed on B1.

I know journalists are coffee addicts, but let’s have a little perspective here.

And the Journal‘s Marketplace section just is blah these days. Murdoch and his hand-picked ex-FT editor Robert Thomson seemingly are trying to imitate the FT‘s Companies & Markets section, with its emphasis on narrow scoops that don’t say a whole lot.

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Why he wants to imitate a paper that sells about one-fifth of the papers the Journal does, I’ll never know.

LATE UPDATE:

This newsflash across the top of WSJ.com is more like it:

Starbucks will close another 300 stores and cut nearly 7,000 workers.

Ryan Chittum is a former Wall Street Journal reporter, and deputy editor of The Audit, CJR’s business section. If you see notable business journalism, give him a heads-up at rc2538@columbia.edu. Follow him on Twitter at @ryanchittum.