Starbucks and Business Ethics

Different businesses have different ways of advertising their products and contributing to the outside world. Starbucks being amongst these different businesses has an unethical way of marketing its goods. Their advertisements are very broad and manipulative to their customers. Starbucks follows business ethics, which is what makes marketing and global contribution circulate. They also give businesses different objectives they follow to be more fair and truthful to their consumers and workers. Starbucks, on the other hand, uses different strategies to reach its objectives while making unethical actions. Manipulations of consumer education, fair-trade, and advertisements can lead Starbucks to make unethical decisions. All businesses use one overall outlook on their future of their company; making money while having a respected name. They perform these measures by having an ethical image in the business world or to their consumers. Likewise, Starbucks projects an image of community contribution and ethical surrounding in its name. One community contribution it brings is being a part of helping out its environment, by having recyclable cups, clean community environment, and bring about a green attitude. While all these are great ways of helping around the globe, they all have immoral actions brought by them.

In correspondence to this idea, Slavoj Zizek speaks of Starbucks and its comfortable environment in his video “First Tragedy than as Farce.” He makes a suggestion that the clean environment of Starbucks is set to make customers have a sense of greatness while spending money and feel as if they are making great contributions to their environments. Likewise, Gavin Fridell in his article, “The Co-Operation and the Corporation: Competing Visions of the Future of Fair Trade,” speaks of fair trade and how it has become a way of getting money by having lack of information on where and how much of consumer’s money goes to the charities. While having good contributions and great ideas, Starbucks’ thought behind it isn’t for the best.

Consumer education can make or break a business and its drive for consumer respect. If people are well educated on where and how their coffee is made and how much of their money actually goes to the right people, they wouldn’t be misinformed and mislead to unethical doings. This in return harms the business’s one major way of getting money. When a person walks into a Starbucks store he/she sees advertising of workers and visualizing the hard work someone puts in, makes that person want to spend money to help out the people that are helping him/her. On the other hand, it gives them a feeling of “killing two birds with one stone,” which means as they satisfy themselves with coffee they in return make a contribution that they feel is great.

While all this could be true, they don’t get educated about the exact amount that goes to a charity or the workers. Mostly what is put on an advertisement is a word or two on how a costumer’s contribution is needed and how the consumers can actually help the poor that are making them their coffee. By taking this in hand, Gavin Fridell sums up this idea by saying ” Industry only responds to consumer demand (83).” This statement implies that how much consumers contribute would be what makes the coffee industry run as a whole. For this reason Starbucks coffee feels the need to misinform its costumers about their contributions so that its industry stays on the top and they get the greater amount money.

One advertisement Starbucks often uses for their benefit is Fair Trade. Fair Trade is a movement that is set to help producers of different products in developing countries. As one might get by the name, these actions should be fair where the amount of money that the products are sold should be close to the amount the producers receive. Different products such as coffee beans and tea are part of the fair trade Starbucks is involved in. Unfortunately, these products may be hard to get for the developing countries that lack in advanced machines that are used to consume them; however, Starbucks has great contributions to these causes and actually puts in effort to get these machines to the workers. Also, their thought of helping others might not be solely for good reasons; there are some parts of their work that makes their contributions somewhat ethical. Likewise, Jefferson in his document Declaration of Independence might agree with the idea of giving the workers their rights as they need it as he said, “…Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of happiness(95).” In this case the workers are given their rights as works.

They are also provided with great living conditions that they could pursue their happiness. On the other hand, what Jefferson might not agree with would be the idea of taking profit off of farmers that are working harder on the job than the whole Starbucks industry. Without these workers, there wouldn’t be customer demand, and without customer demand there wouldn’t be Starbucks. There are also two kinds of fair trade different businesses can be involved in; one is stakeholder-driven and the other shareholder-driven. The stakeholder-driven fair trade, as explained by Fridell, runs its business behavior by the drive of ” consumer decisions (83).” In contrast, the shareholders-driven fair trade is used by Starbucks as it, “possesses massive marketing and distributional resources that it uses to merely to respond to consumers but to manipulate their demands in the first place (86).” Fridell compares and contrasts these ideas to show us the unethical use of fair trade done by businesses like Starbucks.

Have you ever walked into Starbucks and felt like you are overwhelmed with the amount of advertisement thrown at you? Well I wouldn’t blame you, it happens to all of us. While waiting on my coffee, I took a great notice in the water bottles that Starbucks started selling. It said Ethos, which made me question the meaning of the word . Ethos determines a person’s actions instead of his/her thoughts or believes. This, in turn, means Starbucks use of this water to help children across the world in a need of clean water is not about them having the emotional thought and desire but to maneuver consumers into believing they are putting great contributions. This advertisement does not include how much of it will be going into helping the children, so costumers are just made to believe the emotionally attracting pictures of the advertisements and feel great about what they have done.

Sadly, their contributions mostly go to the employees of Starbucks or making the stores look better. As seen on Starbucks’ website, only $0.50 is contributed to the great need of water in developing countries, while an Ethos water bottle is $1.50. Starbucks gets profit that is promised to go for needy children which makes it not a charity. Other advertisement frauds they pull are the look of the store and the café environment. When costumers linger around and get the feeling of community unity, they feel as if spending money is not bad. As Frindell said, “…it makes consumers feel good about drinking Starbucks’ coffee (87)” and they also feel this great connection with workers and farmers. As they may be helping others, their fraud uninformative advertisements make them more unethical than not helping at all.

All businesses need some kind of way to make money while making others happy. The way they go about this is what determines their ethical usage of business ethics. Consumers have to go hand in hand with the amount of product an industry makes, which means a business is supposed to run on consumer decisions. Also, equality is very important in an ethical world. If one doesn’t follow the code of ethics, then that business can fall below. Even though we see Starbucks climbing the ladders of great business, consumers aren’t happy being mislead in their contributions which at some point can lead a down fall in consumer contributions. While it seems as if a person is helping a child by buying Ethos water, he/she really isn’t. Zizek might agree with the idea of what a person contributes to what is already destroyed might not help reconstruct what is already bad by making a statement, “…r epairing with his right hand, what he destroyed with his left hand (RS. Animate). ” Consumers that feel as if they helped children in need of water by putting in $0.50 aren’t really contributing a great deal because their donation would not help in the longer run for these children.

On the other hand, misinformation on fair trade is a manipulation of customer contributions and it is rather sad that a company uses developing countries to earn profits. On the same note, Findell might agree with the idea that Starbucks gives less support to fair trade but might try to contribute its ideas to other weak thoughts that might be brought by them. While they surly might be putting in more assistance in their industry than other business, they have great amount of unethical actions they need to change around. Changing their advertisements into informing others with details of their contributions and charities could actually change the number of customers they get. Being ethical is being open with others and not putting different frauds that make people question your actions. Likewise, Starbucks manipulations of consumer education, fair trade, and their overall advertisements lead them to be ethically wrong.