Starbucks Nation

Here is a devastating, hilarious satire of coffee-swilling, celebrity-obsessed Southern California pop culture by one of the freshest new voices in fiction. Morgan Beale has a celebutante, masochist wife and a home being renovated. He begins adapting the latest bestseller, The Chihuahua in the Blue Prada Bag, from a local hotel room. Dodging the paparazzi one morning on his way to Starbucks, he discovers the surreal otherworld of Starbucks Nation, a film set littered with characters from Beale’s life and the novel he’s adapting, including a talking Chihuahua and an elite commando unit of ethnic cookie-making elves. Mercilessly lampooning our fascination with reality television, celebrity blunders, B movies, and mindless infotainment, Starbucks Nation brilliantly showcases the absurdities of modern society.

A revolutionary new way to understand America's complex cultural and political landscape, with proof that local communities have a major impact on the nation's behavior-in the voting booth and beyond. In a climate of culture wars and tremendous economic uncertainty, the media have often reduced America to a simplistic schism between red states and blue states. In response to that oversimplification, journalist Dante Chinni teamed up with political geographer James Gimpel to launch the Patchwork Nation project, using on-the-ground reporting and statistical analysis to get past generalizations and probe American communities in depth. The result is Our Patchwork Nation, a refreshing, sometimes startling, look at how America's diversities often defy conventional wisdom. Looking at the data, they recognized that the country breaks into twelve distinct types of communities, and old categories like "soccer mom" and "working class" don't matter as much as we think. Instead, by examining Boom Towns, Evangelical Epicenters, Military Bastions, Service Worker Centers, Campus and Careers, Immigration Nation, Minority Central, Tractor Community, Mormon Outposts, Emptying Nests, Industrial Metropolises, and Monied Burbs, the authors demonstrate the subtle distinctions in how Americans vote, invest, shop, and otherwise behave, reflect what they experience on their local streets and in their daily lives. Our Patchwork Nation is a brilliant new way to debate and examine the issues that matter most to our communities, and to our nation.

Global Business Today has been developed specifically to meet the needs of international students of business. Written in a refreshing, informative, and accessible style, it has become the most widely used text in the International Business market with its comprehensive and up-to-date contents; focus on managerial implications and application of international business concepts; and incorporation of ancillary resources that enliven the text and make it easier to teach. In addition to boxed material which provides insightful illustrations in every chapter, interesting anecdotes have been carefully weaved into the narrative of the text to engage the reader. Enhancements to the Global Edition include: New Country Focus boxes that provide background on the political, economic, social, or cultural aspects of countries grappling with an international business issue to help raise students’ awareness of how national and geographic differences affect the conduct of international business, such as Corruption in the Philippines and the Export Processing Zone Authority of Pakistan. New Management Focus boxes that provide lively illustrations of the relevance of chapter material for the practice of international business, including Patenting Basmati Rice and Expatriate Managers. New Perspective boxes that provide additional context for chapter topics, such as Market Economy in China, Australian SMEs Embrace the Chinese Currency, and Global Variations in Ownership Structure.

After noticing his long dead friend, Luke, staring at a hole in the ground, celebrity Morgan Beale is transported into an alternate universe filled with characters from his life and the novel he is adapting.

“Simon knows more about Starbucks—and about why so many Americans find perfection in their lattes—than anyone. He connects our deepest desires to be good, smart, ethical consumers with our equally strong yearning to consume in an authentic way. Our coffee, Simon shows, is us.”—Sharon Zukin, author of Naked City

STARBUCKED will be the first book to explore the incredible rise of the Starbucks Corporation and the caffeine-crazy culture that fueled its success. Part Fast Food Nation, part Bobos in Paradise, STARBUCKED combines investigative heft with witty cultural observation in telling the story of how the coffeehouse movement changed our everyday lives, from our evolving neighborhoods and workplaces to the ways we shop, socialize, and self-medicate. In STARBUCKED, Taylor Clark provides an objective, meticulously reported look at the volatile issues like gentrification and fair trade that distress activists and coffee zealots alike. Through a cast of characters that includes coffee-wild hippies, business sharks, slackers, Hollywood trendsetters and more, STARBUCKED explores how America transformed into a nation of coffee gourmets in only a few years, how Starbucks manipulates psyches and social habits to snare loyal customers, and why many of the things we think we know about the coffee commodity chain are false.

This book offers a direct, actionable plan CMOs can use to map out initiatives that are properly sequenced and designed for success—regardless of where their marketing organization is in the process. The authors pose the following critical questions to marketers: (1) How should modern marketers be thinking about artificial intelligence and machine learning? and (2) How should marketers be developing a strategy and plan to implement AI into their marketing toolkit? The opening chapters provide marketing leaders with an overview of what exactly AI is and how is it different than traditional computer science approaches. Venkatesan and Lecinski, then, propose a best-practice, five-stage framework for implementing what they term the "AI Marketing Canvas." Their approach is based on research and interviews they conducted with leading marketers, and offers many tangible examples of what brands are doing at each stage of the AI Marketing Canvas. By way of guidance, Venkatesan and Lecinski provide examples of brands—including Google, Lyft, Ancestry.com, and Coca-Cola—that have successfully woven AI into their marketing strategies. The book concludes with a discussion of important implications for marketing leaders—for your team and culture.

Contains a collection of short satirical works, including "The Red Bow," in which a town is consumed by pet-killing hysteria, and "Bohemians," in which two Eastern European widows attempt to fit into suburban America.