From corporation-watch at countercorp.org Mon Jul 20 17:45:10 2009 From: corporation-watch at countercorp.org (Corporation Watch) Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2009 14:45:10 -0700 Subject: [Corp. Watch] Un-branding the herd: Outing secret corporate chains Message-ID: <1C744996-6F72-4C9C-B64A-A7D2B7597215@countercorp.org> Starbucks Tests New Names for Stores By Melissa Allison (Seattle Times, July 16) -- When is a Starbucks not a Starbucks? When it's a 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea. The ubiquitous coffeeshop giant is dropping the household name from its 15th Avenue East store in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood, a shop that was slated to close at one point last year but is being remodeled in Starbucks' new rustic, eco-friendly style. It will open next week, the first of at least three remodeled Seattle- area stores that will bear the names of their neighborhoods rather than the 16,000-store chain to which they belong. Names and locations for the other two shops have not been finalized. If the pilot goes well in Seattle, it could move to other markets. The new names are meant to give the stores "a community personality," said Tim Pfeiffer, senior vice president of global design. Starbucks' ubiquitous logo will be absent, with bags of the company's coffee and other products re-branded with the 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea name. In the spirit of a traditional coffeehouse, it will serve wine and beer, host live music and poetry readings, and sell espresso from a manual machine rather than the automated type found in most Starbucks stores. The changes come at a time when retailers, including Starbucks, are suffering from slower foot traffic and lower profits. Those who can capture a sense of community and offer consumers a compelling experience will win in the long run, said Michelle Barry, senior vice president of the market-research firm Hartman Group in Bellevue. "It's not about nostalgia per se, but more about telling a story and re-appropriating some things from the past and re-imagining them in a new environment," she said. Some local coffee-shop owners say Starbucks is appropriating more than their environments. Sebastian Simsch, co-owner of Seattle Coffee Works near Pike Place Market, became frustrated last year after large groups of Starbucks employees kept crowding into his 300-square-foot store to look around. "I thought it was funny" at first, he said. "We're this little store, and I thought Starbucks didn't need to learn from me." But by the third group's visit, Simsch let them know what he thought. "I said, 'If you want to buy something, that's great, but just to look, that's not cool'," he recounted. "I called the PR department and said, 'Never again'." They did not come back, even after he moved into a much larger store next door. Victrola Coffee Roasters saw the Starbucks people a lot more often. "They spent the last 12 months in our store up on 15th [Avenue] with these obnoxious folders that said, 'Observation' on them," said Victrola owner Dan Ollis. Ollis thinks it's interesting that they spent all that time in his shop, which serves wine and beer, and then applied for a license to sell wine and beer at 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea. He's also intrigued by the name change, but said it will mean little if the new store looks like Starbucks' other newly remodeled stores. Like those stores, the 15th Avenue location was designed using local talent and materials, including table tops from a landscaper's stone yard and discarded theater seats from a local antiques dealer. "This one is definitely a little neighborhood coffee shop," Pfeiffer said. Ollis has his doubts. "Starbucks is Starbucks, and we're different from them," he said. Then his competitive streak kicked in. "I wonder if they will want to participate in a Victrola barista smackdown?" Pfeiffer didn't flinch at the idea. "We should set that up," he said. From corporation-watch at countercorp.org Fri Jul 24 13:47:30 2009 From: corporation-watch at countercorp.org (Corporation Watch) Date: Fri, 24 Jul 2009 10:47:30 -0700 Subject: [Corp. Watch] Pot, meet kettle: Wal-Mart's glass-house 'sustainability index' strategy Message-ID: <7C2A1D3E-B42D-433F-9BE6-2181F07E3233@countercorp.org> Wal-Mart?s (Un)sustainability Index by Phil Mattera (Dirt Diggers Digest, July 24) -- Wal-Mart has taken the latest in a long series of steps to make itself look good by imposing burdens on its suppliers. The mammoth retailer, which is thriving amid the recession, recently announced plans to require its more than 100,000 suppliers to provide information about their operations that would form the basis of a product sustainability index. Rating products is a good idea. It?s already being done by various non-profit organizations that bring independence and legitimacy to the process. Wal-Mart, by contrast, brings a lot of negative baggage. In recent years, Wal-Mart has used a purported commitment to environmental responsibility to draw attention away from its abysmal record with regard to labor relations, wage and hour regulations, and employment discrimination laws. It also wants us to forget its scandalous tax avoidance policies and its disastrous impact on small competitors. The idea that a company with a business model based on automobile- dependent customers and exploitative supplier factories on the other side of the globe can be considered sustainable should be dismissed out of hand. Yet Wal-Mart is skilled at greenwashing and is, alas, being taken seriously by many observers who should know better. On close examination, Wal-Mart?s latest plan is, like many of its previous social responsibility initiatives, rather thin. All the company is doing at first is to ask suppliers to answer 15 questions. Ten of these involve environmental issues such as greenhouse gas emissions, water use, waste generation and raw materials sourcing. The final five questions are listed under the heading of ?People and Community: Ensuring Responsible and Ethical Production.? Two of them involve ?social compliance.? It is an amazing act of chutzpah for Wal- Mart, which probably keeps more sweatshops in business than any other company, to claim moral authority to ask suppliers about the treatment of workers in their supply chain. The questions in this category seem to assume that suppliers don?t do their own manufacturing. This is a tacit acknowledgement of how Wal- Mart has forced U.S. manufacturers to shift production offshore, and often to outside contractors. Now Wal-Mart has to ask those companies to be sure they know the location of all the plants making their products, and the quality of their output. The point about quality was one that CEO Mike Duke emphasized when announcing the rating system, and is also highly disingenuous. For years, Wal-Mart was notorious for pressing suppliers to reduce the quality of their goods to keep down prices. Now the behemoth of Bentonville is suddenly a proponent of products that ?are more efficient, that last longer and perform better.? Will Wal-Mart pay its suppliers higher prices to cover the costs of improving quality? If I want product ratings, I won't turn to Mike Duke, rather to someone like Dara O?Rourke, who founded a website called Good Guide that rates consumer products and their producers using independently collected data from social investing firms such as KLD Research and non-profits such as the Environmental Working Group. Good Guide uses criteria such as labor rights, cancer risks and reproductive health hazards that are unlikely to ever find their way into the Wal-Mart index. It also rates companies -- including Wal- Mart, which received a mediocre score of 5.3 (out of 10). And it only scored that high thanks to some P.R.-related measures such as charitable contributions and some -- but not all -- environmental policies. In the category of "Consumers", it received a 4.1; in "Corporate Ethics", a 3.9; and for "Labor and Human Rights", a 4.1 (which is generous). Maybe Wal-Mart should focus on improving its own scores before presuming to rate everyone else.