edward fox’s reality

I couldn’t help but flip back through the hundreds of comments on My Starbucks Ideas, a great site for customers who want to share their ideas with the world. I’ve run across a lot of great ideas (and voted for them once I registered on starbucks.com), such as rewarding frequent (”VIP) patrons with a discount, receiving a free drink on your birthday, and Starbucks‘ version of the Speedpass - a card you swipe with all the custom preparation requests you like for your morning kick. These ideas all satisfied me. One idea upset me a bit — making Starbucks ‘kid-friendly.’ One mother quipped with the notion that the only places with playgrounds that are kid-friendly are fast-food places. Gee. Go figure. A place where manners don’t matter. Who cares if your gut is hanging out? Amazing. These places were so generous to put ugly, bacteria-ridden play things to separate noisy children and their irresponsible parents. Go Mickey D’s.

So what’s the thing that triggered this blog? Simple: A penny.

From the ’suggestion’ directly [direct link - do use caution; this page has over 475 comments, and some computers will be a-hurtin’ for up to thirty seconds on this page]:

On March 11, 2008 an amazing Starbucks Barista named Sandra Andersen donated one of her kidneys to a regular customer named Annamarie Ausnes. Annamarie had Polycystic Kidney Disease (PKD), which is shared my 600,000 Americans and which causes your kidneys, over time, to fail. Either you need dialysis, where you are attached to a dialysis machine for 3 times a week for approximately 4 hours a session (resulting in huge blocks of time away from work or family), or you need to obtain a kidney donation (which are very hard to come by) or you die. The story of this remarkable gesture is available on www.cnn.com (search “Barista donates kidney to save customer’s life”.)

The PKD Foundation (www.pkdcure.org) is a 4-star not-for-profit (check them out on www.charitynavigator.com) dedicated to finding a cure for this deadly and common genetic disease. There are several clinical trials underway to try to find a cure for PKD but funding (most of which comes from the NIH) is difficult because many Federal programs are paying the price of a costly war. The PKD Foundation needs to find private funding sources to help fight this dreadful disease.

My program proposal is simply to create “A Penny to Fight PKD” Campaign at Starbucks. Every cup of coffee or tea at any Starbucks in the world would have a penny going to the PKD Foundation to help pay for research to cure PKD. That way, the noble gesture of someone like Barista Sandra Anderson won’t be needed to keep PKD-afflicted customers alive.

Thank you for reading my proposal and lending your voice in support.

Aww. This moved me so deeply… until I realized what a crock of shit this is. But–but Frederick! Edward! Whatever the hell your name is this year! How can you be so insensitive to a disease that almost no one has heard of, yet so many people seem to be aware of it on My S-bux Ideas?!

Oh. Well, here’s my comment:

Wow.

I think I scrolled through about 400+ comments and didn’t really find anything that outright disagreed.

This idea sucks.

@matmater: thank you for being honest. [He said that Starbucks shouldn’t focus on just one cause and I agree.]

There are so many more illnesses out there. Why are we (a) doing just 1 cent, (b) limiting the donation to one disease, and (c) not mentioning all the other ’silent killers’ like Alzheimer’s? Goodness.

I guess none of you have any family that have been affected by anything and that everyone you know is in perfect health, with exception to PKD, whatever that means.

Honestly, there are so many better causes. After donating hundreds of hours at Parkland Hospital (the Dallas county hospital here in Texas), I know that there are many other problems out there. All problems are equally important when they affect you, but this isn’t just you… there are so many sick people, and it’s so sad. Unfortunately, I think it’s better to say that we should focus on the greater good. CONGRATULATIONS. A Starbucks employee did something generous. How rewarding. How nice to turn it into a MARKETING PLOY so that Starbucks can, again, appear oh so never-ending generous, to infinite causes. Instead of buying a cup of coffee, why don’t you people try this..

YOU ARE NOW ALL GOING TO HATE ME…

How about you donate $3.00 to PKD for a year, and be done with it?

That’s essentially what you would be doing if you visited Starbucks every working day of every week, including (paid) holidays (and sorry- no vacation for you, you 5-cent donor!). Did anyone else not see this?

How about all the ladies who pop in once a week, perhaps on Saturday? Thank you, your generous donation of 52 cents a year will cure the grave illness which I still know nothing about. [I’m not saying it’s not unimportant.]

I think this is a good way to publicize good deeds so that Starbucks can again try and lower prices through free advertising while saying that the economy is just too darned bad to lower the prices on their 92%+ profit margin drinks.

Seriously?

How about this. One day out of the year, the first day of the year, you can choose whether you want to take a penny away from each drink you order, or give your whole heart out (pun intended) and pay $6 for a drink instead of $3? Oh, you’re not a regular? Come in twice a week? Very well, sir, your coffee will be $2.50 instead of $1.

PLEASE PEOPLE– Do NOT say it’s small differences making a big difference.

How about this– donate an hour’s worth of your salary one day a year, and if you have a nice low-but-average salary, you will donate for over 6 years of your otherwise ‘generous’ donation.

Just ask people, “Would you like to donate $1 this week to the good cause [of the week/month]? Ask it on Mondays only. Ta-da… I’ve just increased your donations by 5,000%. Was that hard?

Seriously, people. You saw one lovely little idea, and didn’t even want to consider being generous on your own.

For everyone who goes 5x a week, go ahead and donate over 10-year’s worth of patronage to Starbucks in 5 minutes: [link to donate directly]

The minimum amount you can donate is 10 years… for those who venture in 1-2 times a week, it’s about 25-50 years, depending on how loyal you are to such a giving organization.

Thanks for reading this. I appreciate you all, and hope that this opened your eyes to see (a) what a crude, blunt, and honest person I am, and (b) how I have seen what goes on in hospitals, and (c) that there are so many more things wrong with the world that plague us as well. Please be generous. Small things can have big results, but something so insignificant will make that big result take 5,000% longer.

It sucks being so logical sometimes. You shake up everyone’s little snow globe and I don’t think they like that very much. To hell with them. They’ll get shaken, too, and I think that’s my point.