Starbucks and straws.

I realize I am an ignoramus about a lot of things. For instance, while some of my job demands an understanding of business, I'd be a fraud if I said I really know how things work when you get deep inside something more complicated than an advertising agency.

On Tuesday a lot of my friends were chirping with ecstasy about Starbucks' decision to eliminate using plastic straws by the year 2020. (Right now, Starbucks is distributing over one-billion plastic straws a year--that's 2.7 million a day. And the US throws out an estimated 500 million straws a day.)

Here's my issue. 

How hard is it to replace plastic straws with some kind of more sensible alternative? Why will this simple act take two years? Is Starbucks as an organization so slow and bloated that effecting a change in straws takes forever?

Seriously, Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks has a net-worth of almost $3 billion. Couldn't he afford the financial hit of wasted straws and eliminate them tomorrow?

My two cents is that during our current Trumpocalypse we are so starved for anything that smacks of progress that we're literally grasping at straws.

My further two cents says that the entities that will return us from the bring of the dark-age we are speeding toward will be the giant companies that dominate our lives. 

They can, and should, do a lot more than they are. We should demand more of them.