When is a tea party not a tea party?Political movement is complicating marketing of actual beverageBy Rex W. Huppke, Tribune reporter
8:58 p.m. CST, March 7, 2010
On a trip to China in 2006, Tony Gebely fell in love with tea, both the drink and the ceremony of enjoying a calm cup. Embracing his passion, the Chicagoan recently launched an online tea business but has already run into unexpected problems making sure his chicagoteagarden.com site gets noticed on the Web.
"When I look at search engine results for ‘Chicago tea,' I find a whole bunch of Chicago tea party movement sites," Gebely said. "There are a few tea places and then all this political stuff. It's pretty annoying."
Purveyors of fine tea and tea enthusiasts in general find themselves steeped in a linguistic shift, their beloved beverage now associated with a conservative political movement routinely praised or pilloried on talk radio and cable news shows. The tea party movement's name, a reference to the tax protests that led to the Revolutionary War, has nothing, really, to do with tea. But that doesn't seem to matter.
"I certainly can see and have seen some confusion with regard to the name they've chosen for their movement," said Dan Robertson, owner of The Tea House in Naperville, a major tea distributor. "When I first heard about it, I thought, ‘Oh, maybe I can sell them some tea.' Then I realized that probably wasn't going to happen."
He said he recently sent tea samples to a prospective client in Memphis, who is starting a business called The Memphis Tea Party. He searched that on Google and came up with nothing but news of political rallies and links to the actual Memphis tea party organization.
"Clearly that name is going to cause some confusion," Robertson said.
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http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-tea-parties-20100307,0,5997117.story
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