Wearing little more than foamed milk in the new issue of Playboy, the Women of Starbucks have come to a newsstand near you. Yes, the Seattle coffee retailer is ubiquitous, having ballooned like a silicone implant from fewer than 100 stores in 1990 to more than 6,500 outlets worldwide today. For better or worse, the humble daily ritual of grabbing a cup of coffee has become near-synonymous with the retail chain with the evergreen motif. And that's a fact that really grinds the beans of more than a few protesters in this age of pervasive corporate branding. After last week's vandalizing of several Starbucks franchises in downtown San Francisco, the question comes up again: Why, exactly, does this company inspire so much ire? [PDF required] More than just about any other big-name brand, Starbucks is the brand a good many people love to hate. The reasons seem to range from the sentimental (new Starbucks storefronts tend to squeeze out independents) to the practical (they contribute to increased parking and litter problems) and the political: The activist organization Global Exchange claims that Starbucks has been less than cooperative in the effort to implement Fair Trade policies in the struggling coffee market. Perhaps more to the point, the company has come to represent an insidious sort of big-business inexorability and a particular brand of "lifestyle" marketing epitomized by the company's own chief product. They're not selling coffee so much as the "Starbucks Experience." It's a company philosophy that has proved particularly susceptible to criticism. McDonald's often faces resistance overseas, where it represents Westernization. The arrival of a Gap store in a previously "funky" neighborhood can be interpreted as an irreversible slide toward homogeneity. But few retail businesses have roused such an arsenal of resentment as the Seattle-cloned coffee bar. Full article here.