I have a couple of habits that I am realizing are terribly un-green. One is my amazon habit … a friend turned me on to Amazon Prime and now that shipping is always free I just click and order books as I read about them … I never think to bundle my purchases and regularly receive multiple boxes in a single day. Terrible! The other is my Starbucks habit … I just love that tall (venti) cup with its very own adult sippy cup lid.
I was at Starbucks today with Whit and was waiting forever, so I studied the menu (which I rarely do). I noticed in tiny print at the bottom of one of the panels a mention that if you bring your own cup you will receive 10 cents off the price of your drink. I started thinking about this. Clearly 10 cents is not incentive enough, nor are they advertising this program at all. If they raised the price of all drinks by 40 cents and then gave people 50 cents off for bringing their own cups … now we’re talking. I realize this would have big implications for the barista process (now look at that – a TOM-style observation, from HBS first year!) – how to keep track of whose cup is whose, how to price for the three sizes when cups vary in size, etc. Seems to me it would be worth making these adjustments to save all of those paper cups.
Just a thought.