One/Changemaking one change at a time

Thank you to Maggie Mac who through her suggestion, pushed me a little further in my actions, or lack of action, against Starbucks. I took her up on her comment and called Starbucks and let my voice be heard. I started by sending an e-mail to their company comments department and requested a response to my e-mail and will let you know when I get it.

I also called their customer service number 1.800.235.2883 and spoke with Sean (who, by the way, was very nice). I have never called about something like this before and felt very much out of my element. I stumbled over my wording throughout the conversation and felt very not persuasive. I told him what I told you in my previous post. I asked him why Starbucks doesn’t only use fair trade, shade grown, organic coffee. His response was that it was too costly to use only fair trade coffee and to become fair trade certified. He said that it would raise the price of drinks drastically, but that they were slowly taking action to make the switch to only using fair trade coffee. I said “ok” and then told him that I was going to stop going to Starbucks until they started only using fair trade coffee. Before hanging up I asked if there was someone else that I could talk to because I wanted to make sure that the message got passed along. Sean told me that I called exactly the right person because it was his job to make sure that messages like this got passed along. After the whole conversation I felt like I should have been more bold, like I lost my Boston Tea Party pizzazz, and that I should have been more pursuasive with kind Sean. However, though it didn’t come out the way I practiced it in my head, I did call and I did make my voice heard. Our actions don’t always have to be perfect, but it is important to take action. I will continue making these types of calls and to make my voice heard and I hope that you will too. Thank you again Maggie for spurring me into new territory.

*I will also be writting a letter to Starbucks Headquarters. For those of you who would like to join me, their address is:

2401 Utah Avenue South
Seattle, WA 98134

This entry was posted on Friday, May 5th, 2006 at 6:59 am and is filed under Environment, General, On a personal note, Products, Social Justice, Take Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.