Starbucks won’t let you put ‘laissez faire’ on a gift card
Posted by: admin in Marketing and AdvertisingFiled under: Consumer experience, Rants and raves, Starbucks (SBUX), Marketing and advertising
Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX) pitches customers on the idea of personalized gift cards, but there are some restrictions. In its personalization policy, Starbucks tells its customers that “We accept most personalization requests, but we can’t honor every one. Some requests might contain trademarks that we don’t have the right to use. Others may contain material that we think about inappropriate (such as threatening remarks, derogatory terms, or overtly political commentary) or wouldn’t want to see on Starbucks-branded products.”
In a column (subscription required) in today’s Wall Street Journal, Cato Institute executive vice president David Boaz writes about a friend who had his gift card request rejected because he wanted the phrase laissez-faire — an ideology that gained prominence in the 18th century and advocated minimal government interference with commerce — printed on the card. Boaz writes that “at my recommendation, my friend went back to the Web site and asked that his card be issued with the phrase “People Not Profits.” Bingo! Starbucks had no problem with that phrase, and the card arrived in a few days.I wondered just what the company’s standards were. If “laissez-faire” is unacceptably political, how could the socialist slogan “people not profits” be acceptable?”
The explanation here’s pretty clear: as part of its effort brand itself as a neighborhood coffee shop, Starbucks, whose logo is international sign language for overpriced and overrated coffee, wants to avoid being seen as a bastion of free markets and capitalism. The problem is that that is exactly what Starbucks is. This is the moral equivalent of Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) banning its customers from putting “Low prices at all costs” on their personalized gift cards.
This gift card-gate personifies everything that I hate about Starbucks. It’s a multinational empire passing itself off as a neighborhood coffee shop. That’s nothing short of identity theft.
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