Starbucks pimping out Veterans for profit.
Why has doing the right thing become so hard to do without all the “Notice Me” nonsense that goes along with it these days? Starbucks is some kind of coffee company that sells fancy cupcakes too, you might have seen one or two of their stores around town.
Here at Starbucks, veterans, military spouses and civilians work side by side every day. Watch what happens.
Veterans and military spouses are changing our perspectives and our company for the better every day. Learn more about our hiring commitment to veterans and military spouses, and our programs that support them.
Comments on their Facebook page about the add have blown up in their face. It does not seem that they are getting the usual warm fuzzy when they announce how “wonderful they are” to some group of special cup cakes. Starbucks posted a rebuttal to claims that they do not support the Military years ago. You can read it HERE. Apparently, according to Starbucks, the whole thing was started by one Marine Sergeant who has since retracted his statement about them.
It appears to me that they are finding out it is not only some poor Sgt Jarhead that takes exception to their conduct. I take exception to the way they go about many things and almost none of it has anything to do with their coffee. I don’t want to sacrifice the proceeds for a box of 9mm ammo in order to choke down all their political bullshit with a java chaser.
It is a wonderful thing that they contribute to some veteran causes. All the “Look what I did” pandering that goes along with it renders their deeds meaningless. Using a new add campaign to bolster their profits with some kind of “get to know a veteran” campaign is repugnant. I don’t want most people getting to know me. On the rare occasion I find myself in a Starbucks it was not of my own doing and if their customers actually knew what I was thinking they would most certainly not want to be my newest bestest buddy.
I have a suggestion, always wanting to be helpful in these situations, how about they hire just one person in charge of helping people who knows how to STFU about it. I boiled coffee in my helmet for years and survived. I even survived drinking that brown stuff in MRE’s they called coffee. I usually go to Waffle House instead of Starbucks, I get to have coffee with a waffle and don’t have to choke it down with a large dose of political bullshit. What’s even better, the people that eat and work at Waffle House could give a shit less what I think about anything and they never try to convince me they are wonderful people. Just a bunch of folks that know how to STFU and leave each other alone.
I hate to turn on a company that has supported my “War on Christmas”, I hope they don’t cave in this year and claim they have been passing out Yuletide Greetings behind the scenes. Its beginning to sound a lot like, “they will support just about any cause if they can pimp out the people involved for a little advertising”.
When I want a cup of Joe, I don’t want the girl/boy/whatever pouring it to write my name on a cup, I don’t want them even saying my name, it would probably be best for all involved if they didn’t ever know my name.
The next time I go into a Starbucks and they want to know what I am thinking…I am going to tell them so they get to know this veteran better. Its always the same thought…every time, and it goes something like this:
IT PUTS THE COFFEE IN THE CUP…IT DOES THIS WHEN ITS TOLD
Category: Politics
Burnt over priced slop. Got that same crap on the mess decks with the Balls to 4 watch.
No wonder it takes 6 sugars to drink it.
I don’t buy their overpriced crap, don’t go into their shops…don’t even THINK ABOUT THEM! and I feel perfectly fine LOL
Tell them your name is Robert E Lee.
+1
Jefferson Davis and Nathaniel Bedford Forrest should work pretty well too.
Maybe. If anyone there knows a damn thing about the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
It is Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the few Confederate generals who owned many slaves to work his several large plantations. If I ever go to Starbucks again I will have them put “Nate Forrest” on my cup, but none of the millennials will know who that is, historically. Most can’t even tell you who fought our Civil War or what it was about.
Another account I read was that Nathan Bedford Forrest was also a Slave Trader.
Also was in charge during the Fort Pillow Massacre, though accounts differ on whether it was something he encouraged or the result of a major leadership failure on his part. Either way, he was ultimately responsible.
Quite possibly the most brilliant commander of horse cavalry in history. Also a bit of a douchebag.
On the other hand, Brigadier General Nathan Bedford Forrest III USAAF distinguished himself leading B-17s over Germany, and was KIA in 1943. He was keeping his bomber steady to allow his crew to bail out when it exploded.
Great-grandson of the more famous Bedford Forrest, apparently also a cousin of George S. Patton.
Just another fine reason I don’t go to Starbucks.
Dunkin Donuts is much better. And… they have donuts
Mmmm. Donuts. Is there anyway they can’t do?
That’s anything not anyway.
Dunkin is OK but I’ll take Krispy Kreme over them any day!
But does KK sell coffee? And if they do, is it any good?
Yes they do… I get an occasional cup.
I just prefer my coffee with a nice piece of eye candy serving it to me…
Bingo! thats the one….also overpriced, but umm umm larripin!!
Usually make it myself or go local.
If them bragging about helping vets, forces other companies to do the same so they don’t appear to not support vets, then I say go for it. If they didn’t get warm and fuzzies from the community for helping veterans, they wouldn’t do it. I’m starting to get tired of hearing the opinion of veterans because more and more it sounds like you’re whining about every little thing and how you feel offended by it today.
VT is Ironically whining about your whiny opinion. Damn it feels good to be a gangster, I mean veteran.
Peter I’m going to need you to come in on Saturday….
Blame it on millenials. Everybody has to selfie themselves. millenials are killing off napkins, because paper towels have more uses; beer, because they drink whiskey, vodka and wine instead; Hooters and similar restaurants, because they don’t go for boobs any more (mostly because they don’t have any or don’t know what they are); banks, because they don’t see any reason to go to a building for money; etc., etc., etc. They’re also afraid of soap because they think it breeds germs. Might account for that odd smell if you’re around them. It used to be hippies reeking of patchoulis and sandalwood. Now it’s millenials and… pot? Vape? Some strange thing.
It’s something about ‘psychological scarring’, a cute term for ‘parents producing spoiled brats’.
There’s a bunch of stuff they’re killing off, or at least that’s what several sources say. http://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-are-killing-list-2017-8
So, poor old Dave Hardin may have to find his next plate of corned beef hash at Denny’s or make it himself.
Don’t worry, Dave Hardin – self-pimping is something that sort of originated with these bimbos. It won’t last forever.
Why would you need to go to a building for money?
I haven’t been to a bank in years.
They say beer make them phat, to which I responded with two little secrets: Light beer and gyms.
They get off exclusively with online pr0n and those stupid flash sex games.
I didn’t know about the soap thing. I will inspect the little phackers again.
And they KNOW spice and other synthetic drugs are illegal. 45 days of extra duty with half pay and kicked out of the Army with a diss.
🙂 🙂 🙂
I could see the documented reduction in testosterone among many of the newest crop of adult males as the reason for Hooters losing business. I myself have never been there, but only because there was never one located within convenient driving distance. I have, however, enjoyed the service at Tilted Kilt. As for my own attractions, suffice it to say I love tits.
Funny, Dave.
I figured you for a “SAY MY NAME!” kind of guy.
https://youtu.be/dy_DASt7hDs
Fakebucks Anti American attitude came out months ago and backfire on them. Now they are trying to virtue signal pro American marketing and nobody is buying it.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/03/09/credit-suisse-says-plan-to-hire-10000-muslim-refugees-is-hurting-starbucks-brand-and-sales/
After my bait and switch fucking from Verizon with their veterans discount bullshit I have had enough of the pimping. If a company even mentions the word veteran I will shop elswhere.
The latest Ford motor company ad makes me sick.
“If you are a veteran, first responder, leo, fireman or even know of a veteran etc. we want to thank you with a special offer”. Shove it.
end rant.
Sadly, most of the other chain coffee places (cough! Dunkin! cough!) suck ass just as bad.
Country boys are a “brew my own” breed.
Last time I had coffee was in the early seventies at Chock Full Of Nuts on a work break in Manhattan, NY. There is a starfuck in one of the areas where I wait for my sister to do her shopping so I’m usually watching the peeps on the line and checking their body language. This I started to do after I took the online Left Of Bang Course online (CP Journal). Another retirement benny.
I’m having a hard time getting my outrage into the red zone on this, Dave. The Chairman of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, has always been a liberal activist type running around wanting to save the baby dolphins, or something. But by most accounts, he has also been a better boss with his employees than the general garden variety fast-food place.
The 30-second ad spot you’re looking at was apparently done as part of a reaction to Schultz getting in hot water for saying back in February that he wanted to hire 10,000 refugees. Which pissed off veterans groups, and might be considered a more-or-less typical Schultz faux pas.
The ad itself was done by an agency called Droga 5 which is one of the best in the business. Something else to consider is that although Starbucks has been around more than 40 years, it didn’t start doing any advertising at all until a couple of years ago. Which means it’s still feeling its way through campaigns and so forth.
I also have a hard time wrapping my head around people ragging on Starbucks because back in the day we drank military coffee that tasted like battery acid. I remember in RVN making C-rat coffee with a B-2 unit for a stove, and it was pretty nasty stuff to be avoided. And while it’s true some millennial drone ordering a half-caf soy mini-froth mocha yo mama macchiato or whatever can be annoying, the usual Starbucks product is pretty good, and it doesn’t matter much to me even if the kid making it has a bone through his nose. YMMV
Starbucks overprices everything, including the tea that they sell.
A plain old black tea, box of 26 teabags, is $27. That is ridiculous. There is nothing special about it other than the label. I can get the same plain old black tea at Walmart, in the Great Value box of 100 teabags, for $1.98.
So why should I spend one cent in a store supporting a company that practices what can only be termed unreasonably overpriced? It’s just plain old black tea. There’s nothing special about it at all. Period.
I have a feeling that most people who claim to love Starbacks actually only love it because they have been told that they love it.
A nation of sheep.
You’re quite right.
And a Yugo is cheaper than a Ferrari.
Knowing Starbucks, that $27 box of tea probably has a long-ass narrative behind it. Let’s imagine, for example, it’s a black tea variety first grown during the Lon Dong Winh Wang dynasty when it was under siege in 453 B.C. by the evil warlord Won Hun Low who threatened to burn the tea farms, but was assassinated by the warrior-monk Wa-Ma La-Ma Dinh Don.
It’s called marketing, ducks.
Personally, I think Starbucks French Roast from a Keurig is about the best coffee going short of knowing a custom roaster, but maybe that’s just me.
Don’t forget about it being eco-friendly, hand grown, free trade, harvested by the hands of young vestial virgins from the local 1,000 year old temple.
Isn’t that ‘vestigial virgins’, Senior Chief?
Yep.. working on the second cup of coffee this AM…
“vestal virgins”
vestigial is a structural remnant, like a vestigial tail or vestigial organ such as the vermiform appendix.
Unless you made a joke that went over my head. 🙂
Actually, the half and half mix of Folger’s and McCafe’s Premium Roast is the best thing going.
Of course, during my time on nights doing road patrol, I lived on Denny’s coffee.
The old A&P Tea Company tea was excellent.
Schultz steps on his dick just about every year with his social justice bullshit – remember the crap he started with having the baristas talking to customers about social issues and how quick he walked that back? He has tired to make the company the face of his agenda.
As for the coffee – I’m the type that goes to the local places that have the cute college girls that wear yoga pants and bikinis… and just sell coffee, not some social agenda. 🙂
Unfortunately Everett, Wa just banned the Bikini Baristas last week.
That sucks… I’m walking distance from one that has some very beautiful women in yoga pants (I visit weekly) and a Bikini place is a couple of miles away.
Sigh, once again another bit of “local flavor” being sunk by EssJayDub’s with NO SENSE OF HUMOR.
In the sprawling metropolis of Kennewick there is a place called Burlesque Coffee or something like. 🙂 While I am usually able to contain the inner pig Mrs Dino accuses me of having…:) The girls, I mean baristas have a motorcycle wash over there every year to support a Womens Shelter, so I yard out the 78 XS1100 with attached sidecar and go have an Americano and enjoy the view. Oh yeah my motorcycle gets a washing too.
I am afraid I am coffee tone deaf…the only coffee based battlecry is DEATH Before DECAF! 🙂
Decaf: All the bad breath, none of the fun.
DEATH BEFORE DECAFF!!!
I don’t understand the problems with these type of things. Our economy is based on capitalism and in order to compete they have to advertise, including when they do something good. But when they do something good they get hammered because their motives may not be “altruistic”. What’s going to happen is that companies that try to do something good are going to get hammered because they publicize it and they are just going to stop doing it altogether.
If Starbucks and the ad company had even the slightest understanding of veterans, they wouldn’t put someone in the ad asking, “have you ever killed someone?” My answer to that question is a stony, uncomfortable silence that signals ‘none of your effing business’.
10,000 veterans hired says the ad; 7880 stores in the US and 157,000 employees (many more worldwide)hence a 6% veteran population. You can draw your own conclusion as to whether or not this is good, bad or indifferent compared to the 6% stat for US veterans. I’m curious if they had any veterans prior to this push for veterans.
Humans love to virtue signal. Supporting the troops and veterans has become a virtue signaling. Many veterans have jumped on the band wagon by wearing our colors and trinkets. There is nothing wrong with this, and even though I occasionally do it, I have to ask myself ‘do I really need to signal my virtue?’ When companies do it, it is often (not always) a cynical sales pitch. With Starbucks history, I suspect a cynical sales pitch of virtue signaling.
Frankly, it is going to take a hell of a lot more “Thank you for your service” statements before I get over my bitterness for the way we were treated coming home from Nam. I recognize many who say this are sincere, but too many are just virtue signaling without sincerity.
I can always rely on TAH to provide some interesting comments.
I have owned and operated many small businesses over the years. I have sponsored countless organizations and individuals…never once did I hire a marketing company to plan out which ones I should sponsor with the intention of increasing my profit margins.
I hired all kinds of people for various reasons, inmates on work release programs, people in drug rehab programs, individuals that needed a job as part of their parole, veterans who were out of work, and on and on.
Never once did I personalize their apron with “Jane Doe – Work Release Program” or “John Dokes – Veteran”.
Most groups that I sponsored would offer to put up a banner at their event or put the business logo on some T-shirt. I usually declined that offer but there are times when it happened.
To me there is something very disingenuous about a company that reaches out to help people based marketing. They are doing it to help themselves in the end.
I am not outraged by the Starbucks marketing campaign, I disagree with them trying to make it appear that they are doing it for selfless benevolent reasons.
I also disagree with the way they set up veterans as if we are some disadvantaged, misunderstood, special needs group. It fosters the narrative that veterans are victims of something that needs to be corrected.
I guess its nice that they are going to hire and equal amount of refugees from Islamic countries and veterans. It just makes my ass itch that it makes veterans seem as disadvantaged as a refugee.
I would rather they stop doing this kind of thing and just hire people because they believe they would do a good job…but that would not give their marketing company much to prey upon.
“…never once did I hire a marketing company to plan out which ones I should sponsor with the intention of increasing my profit margins.”
And this is why you don’t own a multi million dollar company.
A business with no sign is a sign of no business.
So I guess it goes like:
A business without an advertising campaign is an advertisement of no business campaign?
I am brilliant!
I should have hired you as my marketing director…ahh the opportunities lost during my voyage through life.
You might have even saved a few lead ballons I tried to fly.
Did you ever use T&A in your marketing?
Some day, you’ll be sitting in the corner of a quaint little outdoor bistro….
Fuck Howard Schultz and Starbucks…He sold the Sonics to OKC.
On a much funnier (to me) side note; last winter Starbucks came out with a new coffee drink called Cascara Latte. I saw the ads and signs, and laughed hard.
Cascara is a local (Western Washington) Shrub/Tree that’s bark is used for a laxative. They tried to claim, maybe rightfully, that it had something to do with a coffee bean…
This is what happens when you have people that move here, but know nothing about the local area.
Maybe it’s some airhead marketer’s way of trying to say “THIS is the shit” when he’s really saying “It’s the SHITS!”?
I remember the one time I got myself kicked out of a Starbucks, it was during my days as a Trucker. This franchise was someplace in the Northeast and this insufferable snotnosed blueblood Preppy type was in line just ahead of me, he was conceited and snooty, talking down to everyone else like he expected them to grovel in his presence,… He spends five minutes just giving his order and then micromanages the Barista making it and I said “AND HE WANTS IT STIRRED WITH A VIRGIN ALTAR BOY’S PENIS” just loud enough to be heard by all in there. As far as getting booted, by then I was in IDGAF mode and went to a nearby Waffle House.
GODDAMITTTTT!!!! I just snorted my damn Folgers drip coffee through my nose….LMFAO!!!!!
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!
Thanks for making my Friday! 🙂
I don’t drink coffee. I have tried repeatedly and failed to develop a taste for it, probably because the first time I tried it, I took a sip from my Dad, who’s a fan of lightly-sugared turpentine. What’s weird is that I really enjoy the smell of coffee, just can’t stand the taste.
Even if I drank coffee, I still wouldn’t waste my money on the snob-latte crap at the virtue-signaling douchebags-r-us known as Starbucks.
It’s been at least thirteen years since I last set foot in a Starbuck’s franchise and it’s unlikely I will in the future, ditto with Target.
Ahhhhhh, nothing better than Army coffee…..at the time.
Fond memories of doing night fire winter training on M60A3’s and having the cooks come out with mermites of the black gold with chow. Eat chow, full canteen cup of coffee, and a cigerettte (or two) before hitting the range again.
In RVN when we came out of the boonies to sit on a firebase for a few days, out cane the B52 stove, canteen cup full of water, couple of coffee packs & a small piece of C4. Hot black coffee in seconds. Mmmmmm.
Now, while I’m not a coffee snob, I buy a couple bags of whole beans (roasted by a local coffee shop) and grind them before each pot made. Columbian, Costa Rica & Sumatra Mandheling, all dark roasts. None of that “girly” coffee! As I always say, “I prefer coffee with balls”!
I’ll leave this right here: (smile)
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQDm1wGZbJ3fRsqbreiUkF4pvMrkclNP9D3YEtrr-wgbYNkUAA_Sw
MRS D got me some of these guys finest.
https://www.blackriflecoffee.com
When I want coffee, I go to a coffee house. When I want ice cream, I go to an ice cream shop. when I want a burger and fries, I go to a burger joint. And in all of my years doing this, I have never once asked, or been asked, a politically, socially, or personally loaded question.
What am I doing wrong??
FUCK STARBUCKS. HARD. UP THE POOPER. N.O.T. O.N.E. “RED” C.E.N.T. from me.
Best coffee in the world for me is a doppio espresso while looking out over the banks of Lake Garda.
Unfortunately, it costs $1002 a cup.
$2 for the coffee and $1000 for the round trip plane ticket.
HEY, here’s some coffee I’ll spend some money on:
https://www.blackriflecoffee.com/collections/coffee
Well i apologize but I happen to like their coffee. However I buy it in the grocery store. There are a couple of stank ass hippie coffee shops in town. I like to go in wearing my USS Midway hat and watch them stare. I especially like it when I catch them staring and they look away. They wont look you in the eye.