The truth about Starbucks?

Beijing Mug

It was the mug clenched in his hand that distracted him.  Filled with Long Jing tea, it was not the steaming pale green contents that caused him to ignore Diana, but the writing on the outside.  Beijing.  His mind processed this word; Beijing.  Out of some forgotten geography class he recalled that this was the capital of China.  The tea was Chinese, so it should not have boggled him so, but just above the word Beijing, waiting in mental ambush, was the smaller word “Starbucks”.  He mulled these two words over in his mind.  Beijing has Starbucks?  China, the country that created tea was drinking coffee, he thought incredulously.  Diana, oblivious that he was not listening to her, rambled on.  As he turned the white mug in his large hands, it told him little else.  The iconic green logo proudly read Starbucks Coffee while the woman with the crown and long hair glared at him from the middle of the logo.  She always looked angry to him.  Perhaps that’s why he did not drink coffee, an angry logo.  Still, he wondered how a coffee mug from Starbucks, a Beijing Starbucks no less, ended up in his favorite tea shop in Portland, Oregon.  In his mind it made no sense.  Diana was bantering on about politics, or women’s health, or the geostationary orbit of the moon.  He couldn’t say.  He was missing something in the mug.  Something.  He raised it with his left hand, glanced at the bottom and it all made sense.  The missing piece of the puzzle:

Starbucks Coffee Company
         Made in China

Could it really be?  Was Starbucks made in China?  He knew that he was on to something.  Now all he had to do was get away from Diana.

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