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Can someone please explain to us (and we’re pleading here) why actors and artists and singers and even companies come out hard in support of some uber-liberal idea? Cuz it doesn’t take much intelligence to know that the country is pretty evenly divided between conservative and liberal.
Sure, the countryside is more conservative, the cities more liberal, but when 66 million vote for one candidate and 63 million the other, that’s pretty evenly divided.
So why does, say, Bruce Springsteen decide to get all haughty liberal? Surely he knows that he’ll alienate half of his fans — and yet he does it anyway.
But we digress. Starbuck’s is feeling the pain of making half the country angry by making a pledge to hire 10,000 refugees over the coming years. The vow came after President Trump temporarily shut down immigration from seven terrorist hotbeds.
“We are living in an unprecedented time, one in which we are witness to the conscience of our country, and the promise of the American Dream, being called into question,” CEO Howard Schultz wrote last month in a letter to Starbucks employees about the plan.
But since then, the coffee giant’s consumer perception levels have gone right in the bean grinder, falling by two-thirds since late January, according to YouGov BrandIndex.
YouGov says that there’s reason to believe backlash will impact the chain’s bottom line. Two days before Starbucks’ announcement, 30% of consumers said they’d consider buying from Starbucks the next time they were craving coffee, the highest proportion in nearly a year. Now, the percentage is down to 24%, according to YouGov.While many customers were immediately supportive of Starbucks’ actions to support refugees, others threatened to boycott.“Upon hearing about your decision to hire 10000 refugees instead of Americans I will no longer spend any money at Starbucks,” one such Facebook user wrote on Starbucks’ page in late January.
Starbucks has been mucking it up lately. The company caused another controversy when it directed baristas to engage customers in conversations about race. That campaign didn’t last long before top officials canceled it.
Now, we’re not a corporate executive, far from it, but here’s one thing we can say to all those businesses out there, along with singers and actors and performers and athletes etc: Stop pissing off half the country. Keep your politics to yourself and just keep doing the thing you do. Simple.
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