Starbucks is a great company. You might not know that if you don’t live in Seattle, because many people lump them in with Wal-Mart and other not-so-friendly megacorps. But they offer health insurance to employees, sell fair trade coffees, and give lots of grants to the community. Social responsibility is a big deal to St. Arbucks.

The Starbucks Challenge is an experiment to see if individual stores will offer to honor their policy of serving fair trade drip coffee upon request. Kottke picked it up, from which Jordon Cooper picked it up, and got the fair trade he was asking for.

I did the Starbucks Challenge yesterday in Gig Harbor, Washington, at store #00357. I asked if they had fair trade drip (without saying anything about this experiment), and they offered to brew me some in a french press. I didn’t know that was how they did it, and since I didn’t like french press, I declined, thinking I had caught them. I checked their website, though, and french press is the official policy, though a lot of the blogging about it doesn’t mention that fact. One commenter on Kottke.org said Starbucks will french-press any coffee you want at no additional charge if you’re willing to wait the 4 min or so it takes.

So here’s to you, Starbucks in Gig Harbor, Washington, Store #00357. Fair traded!