Merry boycotting: US shoppers avoid Trump-aligned businesses amid holiday season; The Guardian, December 20, 2025

 Rachel Leingang , The Guardian; Merry boycotting: US shoppers avoid Trump-aligned businesses amid holiday season

"It’s the busiest shopping season of the year – and a time when many are trying to figure out where to ethically spend their money.

Over the first year of Trump’s second term, companies and institutions have fallen in line with the administration’s anti-DEI and anti-immigration policies. As a result, people are supporting economic boycotts to show their discontent with the businesses capitulating to the president.

Over the Black Friday weekend, the groups behind the No Kings protests – the largest days of mass protest in recent memory – put their weight behind a campaign called We Ain’t Buying It, calling on people to not shop at Target, Home Depot and Amazon during the marquee week of holiday deals.

More than 220 organizations joined We Ain’t Buying It, the coalition said. The campaign reached millions of Americans, driving more than 40,000 to take a pledge to be a conscious consumer. Signs also point to people spending their money at smaller companies instead. Little Blue Cart, a directory of progressive small businesses, saw record-breaking traffic during the campaign period, the coalition said."

The Starbucks Turnaround That Has Baristas and Customers Steamed; The New York Times, September 9, 2025

Julie Creswell, The New York Times; The Starbucks Turnaround That Has Baristas and Customers Steamed

"For Brian Niccol, who became Starbucks’s chief executive one year ago, the Strawberry Matcha Strato Frappuccino is a test of his turnaround strategy. Since lured to Starbucks from Chipotle Mexican Grill with a $100 million pay package (a large part to make up for compensation he walked away from at Chipotle), he has worked at a highly caffeinated tempo to get Starbucks’s mojo back.

Mr. Niccol got rid of charges for nondairy milk and brought back the coffee condiment station. He moved new people into the executive suite. The company is investing more than $500 million to add employees and develop order-sequencing technology that aims to deliver food and drinks faster. Stores are quickly being remodeled to add comfortable seating.

The goal is to provide customers in the United States — across more than 17,000 stores — with premium-priced, unique beverages in a welcoming, coffeehouse environment, but at a fast-food pace.

Some of the moves have been welcomed. Others, like the elimination of some drinks and foods, have resulted in confusion and frustration among customers and employees, according to interviews with baristas from Boston to California."

“We rely on a quilt of rights”: inside Starbucks’ trademark strategy"; World Trademark Review, June 14, 2018

World Trademark Review; 

“We rely on a quilt of rights”: inside Starbucks’ trademark strategy"

"To counter rampant infringement, the company relies on “a quilt of rights”, including trademark, patent, copyright and design rights, and will often initiate claims that include more than one type of intellectual property. However, before initiating claims, a number of factors are considered. “The team is good about checking in with each other, to ensure consistency in our approach across the globe,” Oktay explains. “We have developed a reputation as vigilant enforcers of our brand rights, but we temper our enforcement with soft approaches in most cases. Most infringement can be resolved amicably in our experience, and a soft approach helps.”

The team comprises four lawyers and eight paralegals, all of whom are based in Seattle, with the exception of one lawyer in Shanghai. “Nearly half of our global enforcement – nearly 1,200 matters – occurs in China, so having a lawyer there is necessary.” As to the characteristics of the team, Oktay is proud that the company hires bright people who are dedicated to its mission. “The paralegals, who handle an enormous volume of work, are truly outstanding at what they do. And, a sense of humour is paramount to success in this group!”"

Starbucks won’t have any idea whether its diversity training works; The Washington Post, April 23, 2018

By Hakeem Jefferson and Neil Lewis, Jr., The Washington Post; Starbucks won’t have any idea whether its diversity training works

"Without the expertise to know what makes an intervention more or less successful, it is hard to imagine that Starbucks or any other organization stands much of a chance of developing a successful diversity training program that has long-term, sustainable effects on its culture. Moreover, Starbucks claims that it is interested in knowing whether the training program it will implement will be effective. As social scientists, we know firsthand how difficult it is to measure the effects of an intervention, and we wonder who on Starbucks’s team is sufficiently equipped to do this. The track record of those Starbucks has included in its announcement is remarkable, but it is social scientists — not lawyers or activists — who are trained to adequately and rigorously assess whether this intervention works, or if it will join the long list of those that don’t.

The inclusion of social scientists at every stage of the process can make diversity training more than feel-good PR moves that are of little consequence. Yes, engaging the scholarly community will mean that the process will be slower. But as bias expert Brian Nosek said, if Starbucks and its corporate peers think interventions like this are worth doing, they should certainly think that it’s worth doing well."

Now at Starbucks: A Rebound; New York Times, 1/21/10

Claire Cain Miller, New York Times; Now at Starbucks: A Rebound:

"Then, in a one-two punch, consumer spending plummeted, and Starbucks, selling a luxury rather than a necessity, was one of the first to feel the pinch. Meanwhile, competition emerged from a new corner of the market when McDonald’s began serving espresso.

When Mr. Schultz, standing at the bar in one of the new Seattle shops and sampling espressos with whole milk, talks about Starbucks, he uses phrases like “the authenticity of the coffee experience” and “the romance, the theater of bringing that to life.”

But that does not match the reality of many Starbucks customers, who rush through each morning on their way to work, or many of its former customers, who have rejected the chain’s cookie-cutter shops in favor of small local shops that serve more carefully made coffee.

Mr. Schultz’s first job upon returning was to halt the marathon store openings, lay off 1,500 United States store employees and 1,700 global corporate employees and figure out how to get the remaining 150,000 to think like employees of a scrappy little company that just wants to serve a good cup of coffee. Starbucks’ coffee buyers, for example, had chosen only varieties of beans that were produced in large enough quantities to supply all Starbucks stores. They rejected coffees made in small batches, which artisanal coffeehouses specialize in. Mr. Schultz changed that. “We’re not one size fits all.”

Even as Mr. Schultz tries to manage more like a start-up founder, he has given in to traditional big-company ideas that he had previously resisted. Last year, Starbucks embraced customer research surveys and ran its first major advertising campaign...

Mr. Schultz brought Cliff Burrows, who was managing stores abroad, back to Seattle to run American operations. One of the first discoveries he made talking to customers seemed basic, but had been lost in Starbucks’ push to open stores.

Coffee drinkers in the Sun Belt, it turns out, prefer cold drinks, while those in the Northeast generally like drip coffee and those in the Pacific Northwest drink more espresso. Yet the executives in charge of regions of the country were divided along time zones and out of touch with what different customers wanted."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/business/21sbux.html?scp=2&sq=starbucks&st=cse