It looks like poor hysterical Abby Spangler and her stuck CAPS LOCK key pulled the Brady Campaign into a fight they could not win with Starbucks. And so now, their campaign against the company, for their own sake, should be considered toast.
I subscribe to some food industry news sites, and yesterday I kept a close eye on anything related to the Starbucks shareholder meeting coming across those wires. Not a peep about guns. No one who cares about the bottom line cared about the fact that Starbucks wasn’t caving to the Brady Campaign. I didn’t even see a mention of it any industry news source or business article on the meeting.
If you want to know what investors are most excited about, it’s their instant coffee brand Via, the drastic expense cutting, and another brand of coffee they acquired in 2003, Seattle’s Best Coffee. In fact, the retailer is going to start growing again, this time being a little smarter about the process. Several analysts were quoted saying they expect very good outcomes for Starbucks based on all of the news coming out of this meeting. This year, their stock was upgraded to Buy from neutral. In other words, people just don’t care about their carry policies.
Not a peep? Elsewhere it has been noted that the CEO – incorrectly – stated that no loaded firearms were allowed to be carried by state law and therefore it was no big deal. He so stated in a State that, like many of those that allow carry, allows the carried firearms to be loaded…
The CEO did acknowledge questions but none of that got picked up in the mainstream business coverage of the shareholder meeting. Forbes didn’t mention it, Reuters didn’t utter a word, and so on. There were probably a dozen different articles about their meeting, and none of them mentioned it.
Yes, I am aware of what happened at the meeting. But, the story is that investors don’t give a damn. They aren’t concerned about it and analysts still expect them to perform well. That is the story.
Hi, Bitter
Made the local news:http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/flatpages/video/mediacenterbc3.html?bctid=73740835001
That counts to some degree, but I was really looking at the coverage on the issues that will matter to Starbucks – the bottom line from the people who give them money. If the business analysts started to raise it as a serious threat, then we would have to be concerned. Pretty clearly, they don’t view this as worth any serious consideration.