Starbucks donates coffee to troops after all

Posted Jul 5th 2006 1:04PM by Michael Canfield
Filed under: Rumors, Press Releases, Starbucks (SBUX)

Starbucks refuted a potentially embarrassing rumor floating around the net ~~last week,~~ which had the coffee company allegedly denying the request of Marines stationed in Iraq for some gourmet coffee free-of-charge to cheer up them up.

TruthorFiction.com did a good job of summarizing and investigating the story of an email from a Marine [Sgt. Howard Wright] which said some other Marines wrote to Starbucks to say how much they liked Starbucks coffee and to request donations. The rumor began circulated that Starbucks responded with a blanket statement that they "don't support the war and will not send any coffee." Sgt. Wright then wrote the email urging a boycott of Starbucks.

Starbucks responded to Sgt. Wright by stating that the actual reason no coffee was donated "was because the official Starbucks donation policy authorizes such gifts to officially designated public charities, including libraries and schools, and that the U.S. military or military personnel do not qualify," but was never mean to be a statement about the war itself.

Starbucks further said that many individual company employees have been donating their one pound of free coffee per week benefit to members of the military or organizations that provide services to the military, and that many current and former Starbucks employees are themselves on active military duty today. Sgt. Wright then withdrew his call for the boycott.

Whatever the initial impetus, Starbucks [Nasdaq: SBUX] and the Red Cross ~~have now just announced they are~~ ~~teaming~~ [teamed up] to deliver hot java to U.S. service members overseas.

3:21 pm Corrections! This rumor, as commentators below point out, is not new. However, the The Newsmax story about sbux refutation of the rumor, linked to above, is dated 30 June, 2006. Furthermore, it was indeed lame of me to misreport on the Starbucks/Red Cross partnership as being new. It is now well into its third year.

Tags: coffee, gourmet coffee, GourmetCoffee, gulf, gulf war, GulfWar, red cross, RedCross, sbux, starbucks, starbucks rumors, StarbucksRumors

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

7-05-2006 @ 2:45PM

Starbucks Gossip said...

Floating around last week?! That's been circulating for over a year.

Oh, it was debunked by Snopes.com a long, LONG time ago.

7-05-2006 @ 4:01PM

KiAnna said...

This rumor is so old it was around when my boyfriend was still moonlighting at Starbucks. He hasn't worked there since 2004. It's a RUMOR, but I don't see what the big deal is, anyway. I've been on fundraisers for small local charities, and we went to various businesses for donations. Sometimes we got turned down, depending on the charity, but it always came with a letter explaining the company policy in such matters. My attitude is: BIG DEAL - IT'S A CHARITY. We're asking people to voluntarily give us stuff -- $ or goods. People and businesses have the right to choose what charities they want to donate to. "The Military" is generally not considered to be a charititable organization, and neither are its divisions, or even individual troops. When I want to donate to soldiers or their families that I don't personally know, I look for organizations that manage collections and package mailings - there are lots of them in just about every U.S. town. Starbucks employees get a free pound of coffee each week, and the company got the word out to employees letting them know how to connect with those "soldier support" charities in their local communities. Even though it's not company policy to donate to the military or to individual soldiers, they give the nod to any employee who volunteers to gather the employee donations for the week to do so "on the clock." Also, customers sometimes buy a pound of coffee to add to the week's collections, and the volunteer takes care of those, too. It's not a grand gesture for the company to pay the volunteer the regular hourly wage for those minutes, since it only takes a short amount of time to pack the coffee & other items for delivery to (or pick up by) the charities - but that's a far cry from behaving like a rabidly anti-war/anti-military company. If Starbucks policy was to get all political in opposing the war, the company would, I'm sure, emphasize that all collections for the troops must be managed OFF the clock. Personally, I'm not crazy about Starbucks coffee, but it's not an evil company.