One of the great challenges social studies teachers face is promoting economic and consumer literacy among their students. Fostering such literacy helps students to think critically and independently about their own roles as consumers as well as about the claims and promises the corporate world makes through mass advertising and the branding of the spaces that surround us. With our students, we chose to focus our consumer culture lesson on a company that students are exposed to all the time because of its presence in their neighborhoods and its connection to youth culture: Starbucks.