Comments on: Tuesday with Nicole

By: lauren

lauren — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 03:30:15 +0000

I agree with what has been written about the legal ramifications of the claims that SBX makes about the availability of fair trade coffee in its stores. While I think that SBX is teetering awfully close to greenwashing, I think that it would be quite difficult to pursue false advertising claims in court. That said, I completely agree that the fact that SBX checks this blog quite often is pretty good evidence that they are unlikely to withdraw their website claims anytime soon — they know that there is a community of people who are watching their actions and aren’t going to sit quietly by. That’s a good thing.

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.

By: Siel

Siel — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 21:13:26 +0000

Well, considering that Starbucks agreed to sell fair trade AFTER the first WTO Seattle protests when a bunch of their stores got trashed, then made the announcement about this new “commitment to fair trade” just three days before the start of a national anti- Starbucks campaign planned by Global Exchange, I am guessing that Starbucks deems it within its interest to not get fair trade activists hopping mad.

So a website pull’s unlikely, IMHO…

By: beev

beev — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 06:32:06 +0000

Let’s not forget that Sbx can withdraw their commitment any time they want. It’s is only a web page we’re talking about, right? A web page can be taken down as quickly as it can be put up.

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.

By: Siel

Siel — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 03:52:23 +0000

Good to know, good to know. We’ll have to discuss this further, pending the mid-March challenge…

By: Roger, Gone Green

Roger, Gone Green — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 00:58:35 +0000

In general, gaining a competitive advantage by making false claims about your products or services damages everyone. Advertising such as “the greatest” or the “the coldest” is called “puffery” and is non-actionable. But specific product specifications that are not true, used to bring a customer in (here, the greener ones) could be a form of “bait and switch” or just generic false advertising. Depends on the specifics of the law and the specifics of the claim but in general, in California, this is the rule.