by spocko
Want Guns With Your Grande at Starbucks?
3:56 pm in Uncategorized by spocko
The National Gun Victim’s Action Council (NGAC) has announced a Starbucks boycott
A nationwide boycott of Starbucks stores and its products will be launched on Valentine’s Day 2012. Its goal is to eliminate the risk of guns in public places and ultimately to bring sane gun laws to the U.S.
(image: Fuzzy Gerdes, flickr)
So if you need an excuse to not go to Starbucks, there you go. I’m not involved in this action although I’ll support it.
My problem with boycotts is that it’s not always made clear to management why sales have dropped unless the boycotters can make it clear they are the reason for the drop in sales. Additionally there is a chance for competing boycotts, for example Starbucks didn’t respond to a boycott by a Christian pastor because they supported a bill to legalize gay marriage in Washington State. So if you are going to boycott Starbucks tell them on Twitter with an @starbucks each time you don’t go into a store and why. Right now pro-open carry people are posting photos on Facebook of their guns next to Starbuck logos thanking Starbucks of “not backing down to bullies.” (which I find hilarious, who’s the bully here? The people with lethal force strapped to their hip or people with petitions, emails and flyers?)
I like to remind people that my actions to defund KSFO hosts, Michael Savage and finally Glenn Beck, were not boycotts. They were designed to convince advertisers that these people were tainting their brand. Then, after the advertisers stopped supporting the hosts, we went to the media company investors and pointed out that their “asset” was actually a liability (see my world famous call to Rupert Murdoch asking why he was subsidizing a money-losing Glenn Beck). Sara Robinson called this process “getting Spockoed.”
Since Mike Stark and I now talk about activism on Virtually Speaking once a month I’d like to share with the folks some specific local actions I did around the Open Carry issue in 2010 in Northern California that wasn’t a standard press release or physical protest that also didn’t involve Twitter or Facebook but did involve the media and educating local businesses and national chains around Starbucks to understand their rights when it came to Open Carry participants.
Below I’m going to lay out my actions. I’m not going to get into the issues of Open Carry, the 2nd Amendment or gun violence because then an army of “pro-guns everywhere” activists will show up to tell me how wrong I am and demand I respond to their well researched talking points coming out of the NRA (with their $250 million dollar budget). I’ve already had those discussions and I have my position on the issue. This is about my process working my side of the issue. Read the rest of this entry →
