1-6-15 by The Pitt News

Vol. 105 Issue 86

@thepittnews

Tuesday, January 6, 2015

Peet’s Oakland location closes, among others

Netflix star Laverne Cox to visit Pitt Dale Shoemaker Assistant News Editor Actress and transgender rights activist Laverne Cox will speak at Pitt this spring, according to Pitt’s Rainbow Alliance. Cox, best known for her role as hairdresser Sophia Burset in the Netflix series “Orange Is The New Black,” will speak to students on March 30 at 7 p.m. Cox’s talk will kick off Pride Week, which is from March 30 to April 3, according to Rainbow Alliance’s vice president Michael O’Brien. Other slated events, O’Brien said, will address gender, pride and sexuality. The title of Cox’s talk is “Ain’t I a Woman: My Journey to Womanhood” and will explore “how the intersections of race, class and gender uniquely affect the lives of trans women of color,” according to the Keppler Speakers Bureau website. Born in Mobile, Ala., and identified at birth as male, Cox now speaks at universities around the country as a transgender rights activist. She speaks to empower individuals to move beyond gender expectations and live more authentically. She was also recently

named one of Out Magazine’s “Out 100,” one of the country’s top 50 transgender icons by The Huffington Post and one of MetroSource Magazine’s “55 People We Love.” Erin Cullen, business manager of Rainbow Alliance, is helping to organize the event. Cullen worked with students and administrators to bring Cox to Pitt for “about a year and a half,” she said. Transexuality is an “important topic,” she said, one that “needs to be discussed.” “Representation of transexual students is something that is lacking [at Pitt],” she said. This idea of transgender empowerment that Cox is a proponent of comes at a key time for Pitt. In 2012, The Pitt News reported that Seamus Johnston, a former Pitt student, and Tricia Dougherty, former president of the Rainbow Alliance, filed complaints against Pitt to the Pittsburgh Commission of Human Relations that Johnston had been discriminated against because of his sex. The complaints were filed because Johnston, who was identified at birth as a woman but

Cox

Pittnews.com

Meghan Sunners | Staff Photographer

Abbey Reighard Assistant News Editor

After providing Pitt students with hot beverages for slightly more than a year, Peet’s Coffee & Tea has gone cold. After assessing coffee shop locations in Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Peet’s will be closing locations in those states in order to “focus on our top performing markets,” according to spokesperson Amy Lester. Peet’s Oakland location on Forbes Avenue is among those to shut its doors after replacing its Oakland corner coffee shop predecessor, Caribou Coffee — which closed on Sept. 9, 2013 — in October 2013. Peet’s started an “aggressive U.S. 2

expansion” in summer 2013, Lester said in a release last month. Since that time, Peet’s locations in areas like Chicago and Washington, D.C., have had incredible growth, according to Lester. Even so, Peet’s will be closing all its locations in three states — six in Ohio, two in Michigan and three in Pennsylvania. Lester said the shops in those three areas have “not performed to our expectations.” The Peet’s locations in Pennsylvania — all three in Pittsburgh — were located in Oakland, South Side and at the Waterworks Mall. Jeff Inman, a professor at Pitt’s Katz Graduate School of Business, said a company like Peet’s probably has specific performance criteria that

it compares to the average sales at other stores. “If these new [store locations] were way below that figure, they may have figured it was easier to close up and do better somewhere else,” Inman said. While Inman said 18 months of sales might not indicate what a store location could make in sales in the long-term future, he added that it would make sense for Peet’s to close its stores in areas that fall below the average sales in the first year at its other locations. Peet’s, which is based in Emeryville, Calif., has more than 170 locations in California and more than

Peet’s