At the time when a barista in Starbucks is making close to $20 in tips per shift, bikini barista girls at Cowgirls Espresso coffee earn $700 (watch video on their website). I wonder if the  strippers are making that much (someone told me, on average its $500 per night).

I know the idea is not new, sex sells blah, blah, blan.. Restaurants (Hooters) were doing that for years (not to the such extent, but very close). Still coffee shops are very different from restaurants and bars. Children don’t drink beer and they don’t go to the bars, but they love their frappes and they sure love going to the coffee shops. Now, if parents can put a child protection on their TVs and prohibit their kids from watching adult channels can they stop their kids (more boys than girls) from going down to the nearest bikini coffee shop and watch live what they can not see on TV ?

Recently a few bikini-barista girls were charged with prostitution. Were they real prostitutes before they started working in the bikini coffee shop? I think this is an important question. What if they were not and they turned to prostitution because they moral principles has changed on the job? That is possible.

Is it socially responsible to let the coffee businesses of such nature grow and flourish? Does the society want to promote the idea that if sex sells it can be applied to anything. What is next in this case? It’s plain simple that anything with “skin” element will get additional interest from the male public. But would you like to live in the world with nude ramen, sexy burgers and naked ice cream shops? Would you like to live in the world where girls want to become bikini barista when they grow up? After all, they are not prostitutes, not strippers, they are just baristas…

The number of German coffee shops will be “doubled or tripled” in coming years, he told German daily Handelsblatt.

Starbucks’ German presence is relatively modest although Germany is one of the world’s leading coffee drinking countries.

Starbucks has only 150 German coffee shops against 180 in Manhattan alone and a 17,000 branch global network, the report said.

Starbucks is considering more local purchases of bakery products and other food in Germany closer to local tastes, Schultz told the newspaper. Details would be given in the coming 12 months.

Starbucks, which generates about 20 percent of its revenues from international markets, in July announced a reorganization to achieve its goals of generating half of revenues outside the U.S.

Asked by Handelsblatt about the state of Starbucks’ European business, Schultz said: “Our business in Europe is still relatively healthy. In Germany the business is running good.”

“But we can see very well that the world is currently very fragile and we are considering very carefully where and how we expand.”

The Daily Ticker’s Aaron Task sat down with Starbucks chairman and CEO Howard Schultz to ask him your questions submitted to us via Facebook.

Watch the video to find out what more Starbucks can be doing to promote organic and fair-trade products and how even the CEO cannot decode the complicated and almost secret language of Starbucks.

Q: How do you take your coffee?

A: Different ways. I start out in the morning with a French press of Sumatra around 5 am. Then I stop at a store or two and I have a doppio espresso macchiato. And, I’m drinking a French press throughout the day: black coffee always.

Q: Do you have a least favorite item at Starbucks?

A: I don’t like any of the drinks that have been pre-sweetened, in terms of frappuccino and things like that. Those are fabulous beverages, but I’m a purist when it comes to coffee.

Q: Why should I buy stock in Starbucks?

A: I would never come on any program and tell someone to buy stock — it wouldn’t be responsible. What I would say is as you examine the landscape of public companies, if you are looking for a company that really does live its values and over a 15 year period has had a pretty charmed life — although the last two years were tough — and a leadership team and a company that is deeply committed to creating shareholder value, as well as, living in a way that social conscience is part of our DNA, perhaps this is the company for you. But, someone should really do their homework.

Q: Are there still places in the USA that will be suitable for expansion? If so, here and why?

A: First off, there’s lots of stores in Manhattan and I can’t tell you how many people say to me, ‘I can’t find a store when I want it in New York City’ and I got to say, what are those people doing? They must live in a cave.

However, there are many places in America, where we feel like there’s a lot of opportunity. I think the South is a place where we don’t have as many stores as we could have. Places in the middle part of the country in terms of the Midwest.

But, we’re still opening between 100-150 stores a year in America and I think we can do that for many years to come.

Q: Do you have any guilt about pushing out the small guy?

A: In 1971, there were two coffee companies that were emerging: one was Peet’s Coffee Company in California and one was Starbucks in Seattle. Over the next thirty or forty years an industry was created primarily because of Starbucks’ success. There are thousands of independent coffee stores all over North America and I would say the reason that they were given an opportunity was because of the awareness that was created as a result of Starbucks and some other national companies.

The truth is that these independents do extremely well. The market is very large. Starbucks has about maybe four percent or five percent of total amount of coffee beverages consumed in North America. Big market. We are not putting people out of business.

And, if you think about what we do as a company, I don’t think many of these other independent stores are providing health insurance for their people or giving equity in the form of stock options. So, our cost of doing business is much higher than the independents.

Prices may reach $1.45 per pound in New York near year-end after Brazilian producers finish selling a smaller crop, up from $1.1475 per pound yesterday, Herszkowicz, president of the Brazilian Coffee Industry Association, said in a Jan. 13 interview in Sao Paulo. The commodity will likely trade between $1.25 and $1.35 per pound in coming months, he said.

BEST DECAF: Dunkin’ Donuts Dunkin’ Decaf
Tasters commented on its “nutty, round” and even “cake-ish” flavor, calling it a “sweetie-pie pick-me-up” and the “perfect sip.”

BEST CLASSIC: Starbucks French Roast
Our panelists would brew this blend anytime of day, claiming it’s a “solid wake-me-up coffee,” perfect for “some midday oomph” or a “delightful nightcap.”

BEST ORGANIC/FAIR-TRADE: Allegro Coffee Company Rwanda Karaba Whole Bean
This earthy blend is a “full, serious coffee—not for wimps,” warned one panelist. The beans, produced by the Koakaka cooperative outside the village of Karaba, would pair irresistibly with any doughnut.

BEST FLAVORED: Community Coffee & Chicory New Orleans Blend
In a fiercely competitive category, the deep Arabica beans and bittersweet chicory of this chirpy NOLA favorite made for a “smooth finish”; one panelist found it “bold, rich and classy.”

The scene could be at any independent coffeehouse around the country. Instead, it is at a Starbucks-owned shop called 15th Avenue Coffee & Tea.

The new store, one of two in Seattle’s trendy Capitol Hill neighborhood, grew out of a series of brainstorming sessions by a group of Starbucks employees after Howard D. Schultz, Starbucks’ chief executive, told them to “break the rules and do things for yourself.”

The directive was part of his effort, since he returned as chief executive two years ago, to turn the struggling company around by injecting the multinational chain with a dose of the urgency, nimbleness and risk-taking of a start-up company.

“We lost our way,” he said. To find it, “we went back to start-up mode, hand-to-hand combat every day. And with the kind of discussion and focus that probably we had not had as a company since the early days — the fear of failure, the hunger to win.”

There are indications that Starbucks’ turnaround efforts are working. On Wednesday, the company reported that in the first quarter, which included the important holiday season, net income was $241.5 million, up from $64.3 million in the year-ago quarter.

Revenue climbed 4 percent, to $2.7 billion. Same-store sales were up 4 percent, reversing steady declines. In the last year, the company’s stock has nearly tripled to $23.29, though that is still significantly below the record high of nearly $40 in 2006. But even if Mr. Schultz, who bought the first six Starbucks stores in 1987, still sees the company through an entrepreneur’s eyes, it is no longer a start-up and its stores are not local coffeehouses. Some analysts wonder whether Starbucks is refusing to accept its new identity.

“That kind of resonance it had at one point is going to be hard to recapture,” said Bryant Simon, a history professor at Temple University and author of a book about Starbucks titled “Everything but the Coffee.” “It’s his own sense of the brand overtaking what’s doable right now.”

When Mr. Schultz returned in January 2008, Starbucks had just posted its first quarterly decline ever in the number of transactions at stores in the United States. As the chain opened a record 2,571 new stores in 2007, the onetime growth stock lost 42 percent of its value.

Then, in a one-two punch, consumer spending plummeted, and Starbucks, selling a luxury rather than a necessity, was one of the first to feel the pinch. Meanwhile, competition emerged from a new corner of the market when McDonald’s began serving espresso.

When Mr. Schultz, standing at the bar in one of the new Seattle shops and sampling espressos with whole milk, talks about Starbucks, he uses phrases like “the authenticity of the coffee experience” and “the romance, the theater of bringing that to life.” But that does not match the reality of many Starbucks customers, who rush through each morning on their way to work, or many of its former customers, who have rejected the chain’s cookie-cutter shops in favor of small local shops that serve more carefully made coffee.

Mr. Schultz’s first job upon returning was to halt the marathon store openings, lay off 1,500 United States store employees and 1,700 global corporate employees and figure out how to get the remaining 150,000 to think like employees of a scrappy little company that just wants to serve a good cup of coffee. Starbucks’ coffee buyers, for example, had chosen only varieties of beans that were produced in large enough quantities to supply all Starbucks stores. They rejected coffees made in small batches, which artisanal coffeehouses specialize in. Mr. Schultz changed that. “We’re not one size fits all.”

Even as Mr. Schultz tries to manage more like a start-up founder, he has given in to traditional big-company ideas that he had previously resisted. Last year, Starbucks embraced customer research surveys and ran its first major advertising campaign.

Entrepreneurs, more than traditional chief executives, “keep shaking things up and pulling the stakes out of the tent because they like the mud and the chaos of reinventing, and Howard has a bit of that in him,” said Warren Bennis, founder of the Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California, who has known Mr. Schultz since the mid-1990s.

But he has also noticed that Mr. Schultz has developed “more gravitas, more depth.”

Mr. Bennis added, “I don’t think he’s going to become the classic entrepreneur who can invent but doesn’t manage.”

Mr. Schultz brought Cliff Burrows, who was managing stores abroad, back to Seattle to run American operations. One of the first discoveries he made talking to customers seemed basic, but had been lost in Starbucks’ push to open new stores.

Coffee drinkers in the Sun Belt, it turns out, prefer cold drinks, while those in the Northeast generally like drip coffee and those in the Pacific Northwest drink more espresso. Yet the executives in charge of regions of the country were divided along time zones and out of touch with what different customers wanted.

Mr. Burrows shifted the geographic divisions. “All of a sudden you start to see it’s not a numbers game — it’s about consumers influenced by where they live,” he said.

Mr. Schultz also recruited Arthur Rubinfeld, who had left the company in 2002, to return as president of global development in charge of choosing sites and designing stores. To shed the sameness, Mr. Rubinfeld is trying to give each store a feeling of “local-ness,” he said, reflecting the neighborhood and its architectural history.

At the University Village store in Seattle, for example, there is a long communal table hewn from an ash tree that fell in the Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle, and it is lined with electrical outlets because at night it is filled with students studying.

At the Starbucks stores in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, bunches of wildflowers sit in mismatched jugs on tables found in antique shops. Beans are ground to order and poured through a cone like those used in artisanal coffeehouses. On the outdoor patio, coffee grounds are piled in a bucket with a handwritten sign encouraging neighbors to take them for composting in their gardens.

One customer, Joshua Covell, was visiting from San Francisco, where he said he never went to Starbucks. “All the Starbucks have that cookie-cutter feel,” he said. “It’s natural not to like corporate giants, but you can see they’re trying.”

But Sylvia Lee, a doctor who lives in the neighborhood, said she was excited when she saw the shop was opening — until she discovered it was owned by Starbucks. “No one wants to be the duped customers won over,” she said.

For Starbucks, the stores are partly learning laboratories. Some of the things they sell, like small-batch beans and brewed-to-order cups of coffee, will appear in other stores.

But they are also venues for Mr. Schultz to scratch his start-up founder’s itch. He said he planned to open similar stores in other cities, complete with local artists’ work and salvaged furniture. “I think we’ll be able to scale this in a similar fashion at a lower cost.”

The second largest coffeehouse chain in the US trails number one Starbucks by 7,700 locations. That is scary. The entire list of the top ten shows just how HUGE-mungous Starbucks is:

1. Starbucks – 8,000
2. Caribou Coffee – 322
3. Tim Horton’s – 292
4. Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf – 213
5. Coffee Beanery – 200
6. Seattle’s Best – 160 (which happens to be a subsidiary of Starbucks!)
7. Peet’s Coffee – 112
8. Tully’s – 100
9. Dunn Bros. Coffee – 85
10. Port City Java – 55