Today’s story of Starbucks retreating from their green goals to save money’, reminded me of when they were setting up in the UK and insisted on needlessly wasting water, money and reputation.
Older readers may remember the infamous ‘dipper wells’ that Starbucks used to clean utensils. They featured a small continually draining container constantly filled by a low pressure tap into which utensils that came in contact with milk or coffee were obliged by US FDA regulations to be rinsed and stored.
Starbucks is now a highly sophisticated global business, but in those days the team that won in the US assumed they could do so in other markets using the exact same formula and so the initial stores in the UK looked like those in the US including the dipper wells even though in the UK we had no similar regulations. Those taps were on all day, the wells were not recycling and of course they wasted heaps of water in every store.
Inevitably people noticed and the story blew up.
This provoked one of those epic global calls with Starbucks PR people from the US supported by US based global agency people hounding my London team about their inability to handle this ‘PR problem’. Corporate culture in a growing global business that attributes much of its success to standardisation is a powerful thing. No one wants to make the case for an exception to the model.
So we politely and then less politely and then more directly tried to point out that this was in fact a product problem not a PR problem. Unstoppable force? Meet the immovable object.
Finally, one of the exasperated ‘globals’ said “we just want you to stop the coverage”, to which our equally exasperated response was “well just turn the fucking taps off then”. Eventually they did and the phrase passed into agency legend as shorthand for ‘you don’t have a PR problem, you have a product problem’.
