What's Up With Starbucks?

Again, let me ask the question: What in the world is up with Starbucks?

Okay, so the coffee lovers and the I-drink-coffee-for-the-wi-fi crowd, shoot me. But first let me explain before you valiantly come to the rescue of your favorite coffee shop.

Somewhere in the heart of Quezon City is a certain mall known as TriNoma. This mall is owned by the Ayalas.

Now if you enter the mall using the Mindanao Avenue entrance (the one through the fountains), you will see the first Starbucks. If you walk all the way to the atrium, there's another Starbucks there. Then if you go up to the cinema level and walk out to the open-air garden-something, smack right in the middle you will see -- you all know the answer -- a third Starbucks. That's three! Three Starbucks! Ah ah ah! (That was supposed to sound like The Count from Sesame Street.)

For emphasis, let me state that these three Starbucks are within three minutes from each other. You can actually walk from the first Starbucks to the second and then to the third one in less time than it would take to smoke one cigarette. And if there is actually a fourth Starbucks in TriNoma, I don't even want to know about it.

Next, look up the word "saturate" in the dictionary. Then try to find out what "saturated" and "super-saturated" mean.

A law should be passed banning any establishment from having more than one branch within a specified radius. Saturating the market with unnecessary outlets is a capitalist move with total lack of foresight. Three Starbucks might be good now, but in the long run, the other branches will fold, and only one will be left standing. Well, capitalism is not known for its foresight anyway.

Okay, now let me ask the question again: What is up with Starbucks?

Obama is the Fall of the New Rome

And Barack Obama makes history.

All hail the first non-Caucasian president. Highly unlikely in a country where just decades earlier, Los Angeles police officers beat up an African-American truck driver. Where less than a century earlier, lynch mobs still practiced the art of stringing African-Americans from tree branches. Where a little over a hundred years earlier, there were only Africans, not African-Americans.

Since the founding of the American republic, only Caucasians have sat in the Oval Office. Barack Obama's presidential victory is a clear sign that change has come to the land of the free. And this is not just a minor change, like the change from the Deutschmark to the Euro, or from a parliamentary to a republican form of government. This is a change in the mentality of an entire nation. And all changes can be either good or bad.

I am not saying that Obama's victory is a bad thing. I am just saying that like the Roman Empire before them, the reign of the United States of America must soon come to an end. And the fall of the mighty empire will be heralded by major changes. And their new president is just the first of many more major changes to come.