Oct 7, 2008
Skinny Mocha Latte and a Crisis and Issues Team Please
So some of you will have noticed that the old blog hasn’t been in its best state recently. Between work, a holiday and work I really haven’t had time to show it the love and tenderness it deserves. But I am still here and remarkably have found 10 minutes to myself and thought I would post a note around a topic I was discussing yesterday on Twitter – The Great Drain Robbery, or, in non-Sun speak, the fact that Starbucks has been caught wasting millions of litres of water every day.
I won’t go into the story itself, you can read it here. What is interesting though is how quickly the flames of such a potentially damaging story have been doused. Yesterday this was a front page story and appeared across a number of nationals and online publications. Today though, not a whimper. More than that though, a quick search on Google News reveals less than 30 articles. On BlogPulse and the various Twitter trend trackers the story barely raises a squeak!
I’m not going to judge Starbucks on this as I don’t know the ins and outs of the issue however given how prevalent environmental issues are within today’s media, their PR and crisis teams have to be commended for a job well done. Yesterday’s news really has become today’s fish and chip paper!
It is worth pointing out that they did get a small helping hand with Palin misquoting one of their coffee cup quotes the other day. It may not have sold lattes but it certainly deflected some of the attention off the running taps!
Two things spring to mind… One is the line from the article “It was considering other alternatives and cut its water use per square foot this year” – surely you can easily claim this just by building bigger stores? If a new store is 100 sq ft bigger than it would have been, they still only have one dipper well, so yeah they’re using less water per square foot…
Two is that Starbucks have only come under fire because people can see this tap. What about the hundreds, possibly thousands, of restaurants across the country that have constantly running taps for things like defrosting? And a constantly-fed potwash machine? No-one notices this massive waste of water because you can’t see it.