Fuck you Starbucks.

The BBQ Pit
21

May I go back and add a “fuck you Starbucks, for being so self-congratulatory when you really haven’t done shit”?

Okay, they gave their employees a day off. Whoopee. I may be a little more convinced of the corporation’s boundless benevolence if either of the above reports indicated that it was a paid day off.

Call me cynical, but I can fully imagine the Starbucks memo reading something to the effect of:

And on another note, they’re putting on the most blatantly half-assed attempt at restitution and damage control I have ever seen. Exxon did a better job recovering from their oil tanker crash(es), IMHO, than Starbucks is doing at the moment. In light of the fact that almost any act of selflessness in this time will probably reap a whirlwind of public support (and patronage), hand-delivered reimbursement checks and “gifts” (can you say bags of coffee and free mugs?) is just pathetic.

And as for jmonster’s comment that it was just a single manager that was responsible, I give a hearty, “Well, maybe.”

Looking at it one way, they hired the most insensitive mofo to ever walk the earth. Fine. Arguably everybody should be entitled to a job, Starbucks is an equal opportunity employer, blah, blah. On the other hand, they decided that it was in their best interests to promote this heartless shitweasel to, at the very least, the position of shift manager. This indicates that they value efficiency (assuming he ran the most efficient Starbucks store ever) over compassion (which, based on the events of 9/11, said Starbucks manager is completely devoid of). Yes it’s their perrogative, but it still makes them a bunch of heartless bastards.

On another hand, say they hired Joe Average off the street. They brainwash him in typical Evil Empire fashion, to be a slave to the profit margin, and that any inventory left unaccounted for (read: missing but not charged for) will result in his untimely “disappearence.” So brainwashed and/or afraid for his life, Joe A. charges rescue crews for the water. Starbucks, through their brainwashing, is still fucking evil and/or heartless.

As far as I’m concerned, unless Starbucks can prove that this guy was blind and deaf (and that they are, therefore, probably the most equal opportunity employer ever), and therefore totally unaware of what was happening, I’m going to remain incredibly pissed at them, and keep my boycott in place (not that I ever really liked their products anyway).

(Okay, I’ll probably also give them the benefit of the doubt if they say that the manager in question was in shock, and acted the way s/he did out of habit. I won’t believe it, but I’ll suspend my disbelief just to help rebuild my faith in humanity.)

In the meantime, fuck you Starbucks, you money grubbing fuckwhores.

22

Yesterday I saw a sign posted that Starbucks has donated $1,000,000 to the Sept 11th fund.

I’m going to go with jmonster and the isolated incident theory. I can’t imagine a corporate meeting where discussions about proper brainwashing methods for terrorist attacks took place.

“I don’t care how many thousands lay dead in the street we have got to sell this water at a profit” :eek:

23

Imaginary scenario of corporate idiocy #2:

The Starbucks manager freely donates the cases of water to the rescue effort and is prompty fired and brought up on criminal charges by StarBucks management. You betcha. :smiley:

24

I think this is more of a blame-the-employee thing than a blame-the-chain thing. Surely other store managers/cashiers in different stores would have given the water at no cost. The employees in this one store were assholes, but we don’t know if they were trained to never give out free food or if they’re just stupid.

The store could have easily been a Second Cup (or any other chain) with the same employees, and the same thing would have happened.

Studi

25

i have to agree with NutWrench! i would have no trouble believing something like that would happen! (big business is a fucking human meat grinder) i just pity the poor peon who was probably so in fear of losing his pathetic coffee serving job that he felt he needed to charge for the water! (insert image of beaten dog at this point)

and, yes, what Tuckerfan said about his/her sex was very stupid. we can all be pretty fucking heartless, nasty and/or thoughtless at times, regardless of our sex

26

Unless I hear otherwise, I’m in the camp that says this was an employee screw-up rather than a corporate screw-up.

KKB, have you ever worked in retail for any length of time? Any veteran of the retail world will tell you that jerk and assholes can occupy any position in the corporate hierarchy, and that “compassion” is nowhere in the list of criteria for promotion to management level. (My qualifications to comment on this: 5 years of employment with a division of The Musicland Group.) I am willing to bet that the shift manager was young/not terribly experienced and had more than a little trouble grasping the magnitude of the situation (or outright just panicked and clung to routine rather than taking some initiative). Furthermore, the usual safety valve - calling one’s senior store manager or district manager in order to pass the buck - may not have been available, since some 45 million phone lines were knocked out of service as a result of the attacks.

Do I still think the shift manager should be fired? Yes, because their poor response indicates a lack of maturity in making management decisions, and certainly no thought to what their actions might do to the company’s image (you ARE supposed to keep this in mind in your day-to-day actions). The store manager should also be severly reprimanded for not training the shift manager appropriately (i.e., teaching them when it’s okay to bend the rules, as will inevitably happen at some point).

As for this sentiment:

I would not be at all surprised that the first time anyone higher up in Starbuck’s management heard about the incident was when a reporter called to ask about it soon after it happened. It’s quite possible that the district manager had not yet heard, or did not have time to respond, before the top brass got involved. (Lower level managers typically do everything in their power to prevent news of embarrasing incidents from moving up the ladder, as it reflects badly on them as well.) At the point that corporate HQ became aware of the situation, nothing less than getting the president involved would do in order to stop a PR disaster like the circumstances described in the OP.

27

Well, if it’s an isloated incident, let me just say that I wish I lived in NYC so I could walk by that Starbucks, flipping it the bird, and walk several extra blocks to go buy something from a store which helped out with no concern for the public relations boost it might give them.

28

While it may have mainly a bad employee, Snopes take is that Starbucks did not seem concerned until the media picked it up:

http://www.snopes2.com/rumors/starbuck.htm

29

I very much like Starbucks coffee but after reading several articles concerning the 9/11 incident, I will not be stopping at their shops or buying thier products at the grocery store. It’s easy to apologize for inhumane behavior when the world is watching.

30

I don’t patronize Starbucks, as it is my civic obligation only to drink coffee that comes in a blue cup that has Greek Gods on it and says “We are happy to serve you.”

But I will say that the Starbucks by my apartment, an early staging area on Tuesday, and on the walking evacuation route out of downtown, was handing out water to evacuees and rescue workers like it was, well, water.

31

I live in the city where a starbucks manager was murdered defending one of his employees from her knife-wielding husband, so I really have a hard time believing that Starbucks is corporate, soulless evil.

I think this is a fuck-up by the individual manager of that store. I have to wonder if there is a TV in that store.

For all you twits who wanna boycott the chain: You’re ignorant fucks with no sense of empathy.

This is either a manager who knew what was going on and reacted to the shock poorly, and by boycotting the store you are exacerbating the dumbfuck’s reaction, or a guy who didn’t know what was happening and balked at being asked to hand over enough water to pay for a barista for the entire day.

Judging from the time of the attack, and the time required to deal with the rescue, it probably wasn’t even a manager in the store, but some lowly coffee-flinger with no authority whatsoever who made the call and didn’t bother to tell the manager. (But I could be generous with that statement.)

How functional were you on the morning of Sept. 11?

For the record, I don’t drink coffee.

32

God, I hate defending starbucks.

But before I jump on the bandwagon condemning them to whichever circle of hell Dante sent the coffee vendors to, I would need to know a few facts that have not been present in the stories of this incident I have read.

1)How early in the morning did this happen and did the manager even know that a disaster had happened, and understand the magnitude of the events taking place?

2)How, exactly, did the ambulance crew ask for water? Did they fully explain the situation or did they assume “everyone” knew? Did they even ask for the water for free? Did they say “lives depend on us getting this water” or just that “we need some water”? Did in fact lives depend on them getting the water from that one particular source, or was it just convenient?

3)Was opal there?
Remember, this was not a FDNY crew, or the police department, or a hospital ambulance, but a private ambulance crew. I doubt this sort of situation was covered in the manager’s training (though I bet it will be from now on…).

I mean, it would have been nice and all for the local Starbucks to have just donated the water to begin with, but the business-like way to handle it would be for the ambulance workers to pay for the needed supplies, get a receipt, and submit it to their bosses for reimbursement as a legitimate business expense. After paying the employees back, if their company thinks it was cheesy for Starbucks to have charged, then they could fax the receipt to Starbucks and ask if they want to reimburse the company, which is what Starbucks eventually (albeit apparently only after some prodding from the press) did.

So what is the big deal?

I agree that there is a time to put away concerns about $$$ and just help people in need, but this was not a case of Starbucks turning away actual victims in need because they didn’t have any money on them. Rather, it is a case of an individual manager seeing it as a normal business transaction between his/her store and a private ambulance company who had run out of water instead of a an actual emergency.

Without knowing what the manger knew at the time of the decision, and how the ambulance crew presented itself and the situation, it is hard for me to condemn him/her for that decision.

The bottom line is that the crew DID get their water, and that Starbucks DID end up donating it.

33

That’s not the entire point. Starbucks, the company, handled the situation poorly when the rescue crews tried to get their money back. First the manager charged them for water, then the company wouldn’t reimburse the rescue crews until the situation was made public.

34

Okay, here is what the President/CEO of Starbucks has to say on the matter: http://www.starbucks.com/aboutus/pressdesc.asp?id=204

This message was sent to all Starbucks stores, though I didn’t see any good way of posting it or distributing it to customers. Think of it what you will – I know that there are some of you who will hate Starbucks with a burning white-hot passion no matter what happens, and you’re welcome to your own opinion. I don’t need to get into that debate.

I will also verify that yes, Starbucks did seed their 9-11 fund donations with a million dollars, and my store at least, and probably every store, has a donation jar for the fund. All Starbucks retail stores were closed for the entire day on 9-11 (according to the CEO, so partners aka employees could be with their families) with the exception of a few in NY which, again according to the CEO, reopened to help rescue efforts. The donation jar in my store has been making bank since the day of the disaster, and we’re one of the less busy stores in the area.

35

Oh, one thing I forgot … this might also be of interest: http://www.starbucks.com/aboutus/pressdesc.asp?id=203

It’s a statement about Starbucks’s support of the Red Cross.