The Taste of Many Mountains

by Bruce Wydick

  Please come out of the church, Pastor Juan, she prayed. She heard singing in the church, and the singing increased when he lit the gasoline with his torch. She recognized the song; it was “Alabaré a mi Señor,” a song she had sung in her own church. Father Dias always liked that song.

  Some of the church building was made out of concrete, but much of it was made out of wood, and it did not take long for the fire to consume the walls. Some of the singing turned to screams. Please come out, she prayed. Had the lieutenant’s men locked the door? Please open the door, lieutenant, please open the church door! Don’t you know that Pastor Juan has six children? Don’t you know that Pastor Juan and Father Dias worked together to build a new school in the village? The singing continued as the young woman began to pray and weep. The singing continued, even as the screams grew louder and more desperate. The lieutenant stood outside with his men, expressionless, while some of his men mocked the singers. They danced outside of the church and raised their hands, pretending to be evangelicos. The smoke began to billow more fiercely from the church. Flames emerged from the roof. She prayed and wept as she saw the heavy wood beams of the burning roof collapse on the singers inside, and the singing stopped.

  Angela

  October 16, 2007

  The four students had stayed up a good part of the night at the Hotel Chinita at the end of their stay in Guatemala discussing and designing the final phase of the research that Angela and Alex would carry out. It would be implemented when the master’s students returned to San Francisco and had two parts, one to be carried out by Alex and the other by Angela.

  Alex’s job was to find out just how much more consumers were willing to pay for fair trade over standard coffee—good ol’ free trade, as Rich called it. Angela thought the economic experiment that they had designed was quite creative. They would find a café that sold both fair trade and standard free trade coffee for the same price. Alex would stand in the doorway, handing out coupons to those entering the café. Each coupon was good for only that day, and good for one of two discounts. He would start with a coupon that offered a certain discount off any cup of the standard, free trade coffee or a smaller discount off any cup of fair trade coffee. Because the coupon could be used for only one discount or the other, the customer was forced to choose between these two options. If he or she decided to redeem the coupon for the fair trade option, they would know that a particular consumer valued a cup of fair trade coffee by at least the difference between the two discount options. If a customer chose the latter, it meant that he or she valued a cup of fair trade coffee at something less than the discount difference. They would try different price differentials and see what discount differential would result in equal redemption rates between the two options. That discount differential would reveal what the median consumer was willing to pay for the benefit of drinking coffee that was fair trade.

  Angela’s part of the research was to see how much the actual market price of café coffee differed between fair trade and free trade coffee. If consumers were willing to pay more for fair trade, ostensibly to help out coffee producers, would café owners take advantage of this by charging higher prices for fair trade coffee? She would survey a large group of cafés around the San Francisco Bay Area to ascertain price differences between free trade and fair trade. The difference in retail prices, beyond any additional cost to retailers of the fair trade coffee, would measure the extent to which retailers profited by coffee drinkers’ willingness to pay more for fair trade.

  Together Angela and Alex visited one of the cafés on Angela’s list, the People’s Java, in the Sunset District in San Francisco. They walked across Golden Gate Park, wandered around for a while and got temporarily lost, but then found the café. Stepping inside, they saw that the café was decked out in wild graphics and leftist slogans in a tawdry décor that Angela had seen in several cafés in the city. Immediately, Angela’s attention was captured by a mural on the wall of an overweight nude woman with a tattoo and a huge mouth shouting in a cartoon bubble down to a caricature of the pope: “Keep Your Rosaries Off My Ovaries!”

  Alex addressed a chunky female barista behind the counter. “Might I find the manager available?” asked Alex.

  “Yeah. You might find the manager. Why?” Her face remained expressionless. She looked strikingly like the picture of the woman in the mural. Angela was secretly wondering if it might be a self-portrait.

  “We would like to talk to the manager about a research project we’re doing. Is he or she available?”

  “I’m the manager.”

  “Er . . . great . . . well, pleasure to meet you,” stammered Angela. “We’re two graduate students working on a research project funded by the United States Agency for International Development . . .”

  “Aren’t they a bunch of fascists?” she interrupted, attempting a joke, looking sideways toward a small group of customers. A couple of regulars sitting at a table with their drinks thought this was hilarious and snickered along with her.

  After the laughter died down, she reengaged Alex with her intimidating stare, furrowed eyebrows nearly fused together. Angela thought it would be a good idea to get to the point quickly.

  “In short, we’d like to do an experiment with you and your customers related to our research.” She explained the experiment briefly.

  “Not interested. I don’t want students messing around with my customers,” she growled across the countertop. “Wanna buy some coffee?”

  Alex and Angela looked at each other. “No, thank you,” they said nearly simultaneously as they left and the door jingled behind them.

  A couple of other attempts to connect with café managers that afternoon were met with slightly more genteel, but equally definitive, rejections.

  They decided to try again the next day around midafternoon.

  Another café on the list, the Blue Danube Coffee House, was only about a ten-minute walk from the university. Angela and Alex met on campus, situated on a large hill in the middle of the city. It was a nice day, yet they could see from this vantage point that an enormous fog bank loomed over the Pacific. The nice day was probably doomed in an hour or two. They walked west on Golden Gate Avenue past the university’s large soccer stadium and blocks of charming row houses, then zigzagged over a few blocks to Clement Street, where they walked a few more blocks toward the ocean past strips of sundry small businesses long interspersed with ethnic restaurants, mainly Russian, Thai, and Vietnamese.

  “Heard from anyone back in Huehue recently, Alex?”

  “You mean, like Lourdes?” said Alex a little self-consciously.

  “Maybe.” Angela looked at him and smiled.

  “We did exchange some e-mails, but then I was sending her an e-mail about three weeks ago and no response. She probably is busy with church things. I think she forgets about me.”

  “I doubt it, Alex. She’s probably getting ready for the baby.” She changed the topic to cheer him up. “Ever been to this place?”

  “No, but I think a few of my friends have,” he said. “They say that the coffee there is the boom.”

  “The boom?” Angela was puzzled. She looked over at Alex as they walked. “Do you mean they say it’s the bomb?”

  “Yes, I think that is what I mean.” Alex seemed a little embarrassed and was silent for about half a block.

  “Angela, tell me, why does one say the bomb? I do not understand the meaning of bomb in such a context. Does that mean to say that the particular coffee is very lousy?” They continued to walk. Angela found it was becoming more difficult for her to hold a grudge against Alex. They had been through a lot together. It was funny—she hadn’t thought about The Debate for some time.

  “No, no, Alex, it means exactly the opposite. It means that the coffee is great; it means it’s awesome—it’s to die for!” She looked at him and laughed.

  “What does that have to do with bomb? I thought if a movie was a bomb, that meant it sucks really badly,” Alex said, now sounding
naïve and perplexed.

  “Hmmm, yes, I can see that could be confusing,” admitted Angela. They walked a little longer. “I guess it’s a matter of the article in front of the noun bomb. You see, the bomb means precisely the opposite of a bomb.”

  “I don’t understand all this about bombs and dying. Americans always have such militaristic ways of expressing,” was the verdict Alex rendered as they arrived at the café. They walked through the front door and looked around at the walls. It was hip, but not “San Francisco strange.” The Blue Danube had a mixture of clientele, men and women, older and younger, some University of San Francisco students living in apartments near the campus, some working people in on their lunch break. The shelves in front of the counter were stocked with tasty-looking treats. A smart-looking Asian-American man in his thirties stepped up to help them. He carried himself with some authority behind the counter, and he looked like someone who was more than an employee. He seemed like a good match for many of his customers: young, college-educated, and kind of cool.

  “May I speak to the manager?” asked Alex.

  “Yes, I’m the owner; name is Jimmy,” he said, offering his hand.

  “Yes, nice to meet you. I am Alex and this is Angela. We are graduate students working on a research project at the university.” They ordered a couple of lattes from him as they began to talk. Angela explained the project while he fixed their lattes. Jimmy listened attentively as he poured the warm milk over his aromatic brew.

  Angela explained, “You see, we’re working on a project on fair trade coffee that follows coffee beans all the way from peasant growers in Central America to the coffee shop. Last week, we visited Java Joe’s, a roaster in Oakland that imports coffee beans from the cooperative that buys from Huehuetenango, where we spent the summer with coffee growers. We’re working on the part of the project that is trying to find out how much profit is realized at every link along the coffee value chain. And, uh . . . you’re kind of the last link.”

  “Sounds cool, guys.” He looked at them both back and forth.

  “Would you now be willing to help us?” asked Alex.

  “What do you need me to do?”

  “We . . . would like to run an experiment,” Alex said. Angela and Alex by now understood that café owners were wary of carrying out academic experiments with their customers, so he quickly added, “But it should be good for your business.”

  “What kind of experiment?” Jimmy seemed slightly puzzled now, but willing to listen. Angela was encouraged that he didn’t say no immediately.

  Alex responded. “See, surpluses occur at every intermediary in the chain. But the final part of this surplus is what we in economics call ‘consumer surplus.’ Consumer surplus is differences between what the consumers would pay for something and what they actually pay. We have designed an experiment to find out how much the people, like all your customers, are willing to pay for fair trade coffee.”

  “You mean how much more over the standard kind?” asked Jimmy.

  “Yes, you are right,” said Alex.

  “Dude, for economics that’s actually somewhat interesting. How does one . . . uh . . . find that out?” he asked.

  Alex explained the experiment to him. It was pretty straightforward. Alex would stand at the doorway and pass out coupons that could be redeemed at one of two different discount levels for the two different types of coffee. The coupons had hidden marks on them so that different coupons could be handed out to men and women, and people appearing forty years old and over and people under forty, allowing the one compiling the data to identify choices between fair trade and standard by gender and some measure of age. The cashier’s responsibility would be to mark on the coupon which type of coffee was chosen by each customer and collect all of the coupons in an old coffee can under the register. At the end of the day, Alex would see how many coupons were redeemed for each type of coffee at that day’s price differential. The café would be reimbursed at the end of the day for all the discounts they had given from the coupons. Alex would try several different price differentials on different days. This would give them an estimate of how much people in rich countries were willing to help coffee growers in poor countries.

  Jimmy seemed interested.

  “We need to keep the time and day of the week on which we experiment constant so that we do not introduce a bias,” said Alex.

  “How about Saturday mornings?” suggested Jimmy. “I’m around that day and can give you a hand. We have a fair trade French Roast that we can offer alongside the standard.”

  “I will come here this Saturday at eight a.m.,” assured Alex. “Don’t worry. Dutch people never are late,” he said solemnly, but then added, “Except on days when soccer is on television.”

  Jimmy laughed. “No problem, dude. The discount ought to give a little kick in the butt to sales, and the project sounds cool . . . I’m in.”

  They left the café practically skipping out the door.

  “You did it, Alex!” said Angela. Alex grinned as they walked together back to the university. Angela’s mission was to find whether the market took advantage of some consumers’ greater willingness to pay for fair trade. She would undertake a random phone survey of cafés in the San Francisco Bay Area inquiring about prices they charged for their café products, both fair trade and standard coffee. After a little pilot investigation, she decided to focus on two main products, regular eight-ounce cups of coffee and medium-size lattes. These two drinks were found at nearly every café.

  To try to obtain the broadest and least biased sample possible, she decided to go old-school and obtained several phone books that contained yellow-page listings for every part of the San Francisco Bay Area. She would look at the phone book listings in the “café” section and randomly call cafés to ask them their prices on four products: their standard eight-ounce cup of coffee, an eight-ounce cup of fair trade coffee, a standard medium-size latte, and a medium-size fair trade latte.

  She began to make the calls from her apartment later that week. She started with Santa Cruz. That seemed like an easygoing place.

  “Hello, ma’am, my name is Angela Lopez-Williams and I’m an economics graduate student investigating coffee prices around the Bay Area. Could you tell me the prices you charge for a few of your products?”

  “Are you from the competition?” a suspicious voice answered.

  “No, ma’am. I’m a graduate student at the University of San Francisco.”

  “What do you study?”

  “Well, as I mentioned, economics.”

  “Why are you calling about our prices?”

  “Well, I could just pop in your door and look at your price board, but that would involve a lot of driving because the survey I’m conducting is fairly large.”

  “Okay,” the voice acquiesced. Angela listed the products.

  “We charge $1.75 for a small cup of coffee and $2.95 for the latte.”

  “What about for fair trade?” asked Angela.

  “It’s all fair trade. We don’t exploit coffee growers here.”

  “Okay, great. Thanks so much.”

  “Bye.”

  She looked at the phone book for the next number. One down, 224 to go.

  CHAPTER 23

  Alex

  ALEX ARRIVED PROMPTLY AT EIGHT A.M. THE FOLLOWING Saturday at the Blue Danube with his experimental gear, which consisted of a backpack full of coupons and a pad of paper for writing down thoughts and observations. He checked in with Jimmy and took his post outside the doorway. Only a few minutes later, a middle-aged man turned to walk into the café with a Wall Street Journal tucked under his arm.

  “Having specials on French Roast today,” announced Alex, pushing the appropriate coupon with the secret code for males over forty toward him. “Seventy-five cents off our standard blend, and fifty cents off the fair trade.” The man took the coupon and regarded it curiously in his hand.

  “Hmmmph . . . ,” he muttered to himself as he walked to the co
unter. The café was fairly quiet at that hour, and Alex was eager to see what choice the man would make. Would he be willing to spend twenty-five cents extra to join the fair trade cause? He waited anxiously. To Alex it symbolized one of the great moral decisions of our time.

  “Yes, I’ll take the large French Roast,” said the man. He handed Jimmy the coupon.

  “Would that be the fair trade French Roast, or the standard French Roast?” Jimmy asked casually. It was the moment Alex had been waiting for. He kept looking straight ahead down the sidewalk from the doorway but inclined his ear toward the counter. Jimmy was superb, Alex thought to himself. He kept his face completely deadpan as the customer decided. Alex was unsure if he himself would be capable of such self-control.

  “Er . . . I’ll take the standard,” he mumbled.

  Cheapskate capitalist, thought Alex.

  Two women, both around thirty, approached the doorway. “Special today on French Roast. Seventy-five cents off standard blend, and fifty cents discount off fair trade,” said Alex, greeting them happily. He handed each of the women a coupon.

  “Oh, how nice,” said one of them. They walked toward the counter.

  “I just love his European accent,” said the other as their voices began to fade. Alex blushed but pretended he couldn’t hear. Both of them took the fair trade. It continued on like this throughout the morning. Slightly more of the women and, interestingly, the older customers chose the fair trade. Around one o’clock, things began to slow down, and Alex approached the counter.

  “What have we here, Jimmy?” he asked, his voice revealing the anticipation.

  “Dude, let’s look.” Jimmy reached down and grabbed the old coffee can full of the coupons. He dumped them out on the counter. A lot of people drank French Roast that day. They stacked the coupons in two piles. All in all, with the twenty-five-cent price differential, thirty-seven of the customers had chosen the fair trade French Roast, and twenty-five had chosen the standard, free trade French Roast.