Tag: Starbucks

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Over 640,000 thank Starbucks for supporting marriage equality

 

From The Advocate: National coffee chain Starbucks Wednesday received a card thanking the company for its continued support of marriage equality in its home state of Washington.

The National Organization for Marriage launched a boycott of Starbucks because the company’s leaders supported marriage equality legislation that recently passed in Washington. NOM recruited about 28,000 to “Dump Starbucks.”

However, a counterprotest to “Thank Starbucks” grabbed the attention of 640,000 marriage equality supporters.

The pro-Starbucks effort was organized by SumOfUs.org, MoveOn.org, and Washington United for Marriage, which submitted a card with 640,000 signatures at Starbucks’ main corporate offices Wednesday.

“We’ve been stunned by the passionate response to ‘Thank Starbucks’ – our most viral campaign ever,” Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, executive director for SumofUs.org, said in a statement. “We’ve seen in our campaigns that consumers expect corporations to do right by their workers and by their community. We hope that this overwhelming show of support for Starbucks for supporting gay rights will inspire other corporations to keep making similar public statements.”

James Olsen, Starbucks’ vice president of global corporate communications, thanked customers for their support.

“We are long-standing supporters of a culture of diversity, and inclusion and equality for everybody, and I’ll share this with our fellow leaders,” he said. “Thank you very much.”

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Marriage equality supporters send giant ‘thank you’ to Starbucks

A coalition of supporters for same-sex marriage says it will deliver a giant “thank-you” card to Starbucks headquarters in Seattle this afternoon with more than 650,000 signatures.

The group headed by SumOfUs.org, MoveOn.org and Washington United for Marriage said it started the campaign to support the company after it was attacked by an anti-same-sex marriage group, the National Organization of Marriage.

That group set up the Dump Starbucks webpage, which currently reports 25,862 “pledges.”

Let’s look at those numbers again, shall we? Supporting equality – 650,000; anti-gay hater mongers – 25,862.

Ok, now that we’ve crunched the numbers…

“We are urging customers across the globe to ‘Dump Starbucks’ because it has taken a corporate-wide position that the definition of marriage between one man and one woman should be eliminated and that same-sex marriage should become equally ‘normal’. As such, Starbucks has deeply offended at least half its US customers, and the vast majority of its international customers,” the site declaims.

CEO Howard Schultz defended the company’s stance during a company shareholder meeting in March, saying the decision was made “in our view, through the lens of humanity, and being the kind of company that embraces diversity.”

“We’ve been stunned by the passionate response to ‘Thank Starbucks’ – our most viral campaign ever,” Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, executive director for SumofUs.org said in a press release.

“We’ve seen in our campaigns that consumers expect corporations to do right by their workers and by their community. We hope that this overwhelming show of support for Starbucks for supporting gay rights will inspire other corporations to keep making similar public statements.”

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National Organization for Marriage boycott of Starbucks: FAIL

Click pic for larger view

Wow – that National Organization for Marriage boycott is really killing Starbucks, isn’t?  Check out how their stock price is doing.

NOM’s boycott, Dump Starbucks, urges customers across the world to stop supporting Starbucks.

A counter petition from SumOfUs.org aimed to thank Starbucks for standing up for marriage equality was launched shortly after. According to the SumOfUs petition: “Without support from companies like Starbucks, the gay marriage law might have failed.”

Today, the “Dump Starbucks” petition had less than 23,000 signatures — the other, to thank Starbucks for its support of LGBTQ rights, had more than 292,000.
(source)

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Starbucks CEO speaks to his company’s support for marriage equality

“Any decision of this type or magnitude has be made with great thoughtfulness and I would assure you that a senior team at Starbucks discussed this. To be very candid with you, this was not something that was a difficult decision for us and we did share this with the board as well. [snip] We made that decision, in our view, through the lens of humanity and being the kind of company that embraces diversity.” – Starbucks CEO Howard Shultz, responding to NOM’s complaint about his company’s support for marriage equality.
(Audio from GoodAsYou.org)
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Starbucks employee fired in front of customers – for being gay

Well, this is a sad story.  And not representative of the Starbucks stores I know.

A firestorm has broken out on the internet about an employee being rudely fired, allegedly for being gay, at an east coast Starbucks in front of customers. The episode was witnessed by a blogger with her young daughter.

At this point Starbucks has issued a statement on it’s corporate blog addressing the situation.

It’s hard to know all the facts of the story, but one thing is fairly certain – the handling of firing this employee was done in front of customers, and that in itself is bad business. The aspect that the employee may have been fired for being gay makes it even worse.

Hit this link to read the blogger’s story.