I do find the shareholder activism comment made by ButterChurn promising. This is becoming an effective tool in holding corporations accountable. As Roger mentioned a bunch of comments ago, a while back I posted about the legal requirement that corporations have to consider the best interests of their shareholders in each decision that they make. (See this post and the comments.) Courts have interpreted the interests of shareholders in a narrow way to mean profits. That means that companies are legally required to put the maximization of profits above everything else. Until that legal framework is changed on a state-by-state basis, an effective route to pressure corporations to take other factors – social or environmental – into account in their corporate actions is activism by shareholders. Essentially, concerned citizens purchase shares of stock so that they become the constituency whose interests corporations are legally required to serve. Then, those shareholders submit proposals for the corporation to consider at its annual meeting of stockholders. While the proposals often do not garner the requisite votes to pass, publicity is gained if the activist-stockholders can include their proposal in the corporation’s proxy statement circulated in advance of the annual meeting and publicly filed with the SEC. Even if the proposal doesn’t pass, the PR often helps to make a business case for the corporation to adopt the shareholders’ proposal — at least in some part.

So a website pull’s unlikely, IMHO…

Obviously taking it down would have PR ramifications, but if the expected negative PR of keeping it up was calculated to be be more than that of taking it down, it would be an easy decision to make.

That shareholders piece is really interesting, though. Maybe some folks who really want to take some action on Starbucks ought to buy some stock, and truly take some “ownership” of the problem.

Shareholders, on the other hand, may have standing. Perhaps they invested in the company based on its stated business practices… It’s hard for me to see where sbux can get legally dinged for the unfulfilled promise.

The fact is that the law requires a profit motive for any act a publicly traded corp does. That is not to say that some have not made the business case, but it is a harder one to make. A green process that cuts direct costs or lowers lawsuit costs is easy; FT is doable because it generates and sustains good will, an item with accounting value. Notwithstanding that SOME companies are coming around to green values as bankable, they must be bankable under the current law. My point was, this affects the corporate mindset — direct revenue effects tend to have more weight than indirect goodwill effects.

HOWEVER: The *advertised* promise of Starbucks is something else again — and if not lived up to, may well be actionable unfair trade practice under California law, at least, and a varient of false advertising. Promises made and advertised are different than underlying corporate culture.