Starbucks Fair Trade Line

Like a lot of massively successful consumer companies who want their customers to see they have big hearts,Starbucks offers a line of coffees for purchase made from small growers who meet certain economic and ethicalstandards. A challenge for Starbucks is that none of these such coffee growers are on a scale that offers any economy to the company for shipping, pickup, and processing. As a result, the costs to Starbucks are higher than forthe mass suppliers of their standard coffees. Starbucks typically passes along some of those higher costs in higherprices to customers, reasoning that customers who care about such matters will happily pay for the extendedbenefits and feelings of goodwill.Costs to growers continually rise, sometimes modestly, sometimes sharply. It's getting to the point where Starbucks wants to take a number of the pricier growers back to the table to negotiate better deals (for Starbucks), andof course, Starbucks holds the threat over their heads that the supplier will be dropped.

Case Discussion Question - Please discuss in depth:

What kind(s) of power does Starbucks hold over their suppliers in this case?

Iacobucci, Dawn. Marketing Management (p. 184). Cengage Learning. Kindle Edition.