http://www.starbucks.com/aboutus/businessethicsandcompliance.asp
As I was cruising through cyberspace, I came across an article on the Starbucks Website full of zeal and questionable claims. The title read “Business ethics and compliance”. Of course, the title caught my attention since it had the words ethics and business in it. I read the short 3 paragraph description of Starbucks “commitment” to doing what’s right. Right off the bat, I had a problem with this, and it had directly to do with our second writing project concerning ethics. In this excerpt, Starbucks claims to have “everything” in common with business ethics. But, who defines business ethics? How many different things must a company do to become ethical, and how do we know that what Starbucks is doing is “ethical”? You can’t call yourself something that can’t be measured. Meriam dictionary defines ethical as accepted standards of conduct. What is acceptable? Something may be acceptable for one person, but completely unacceptable for another. The second sentence in the first paragraph says “We are committed to doing what's right - from the way we source our coffee to the way we treat our partners, customers, shareholders, and business partners” What is right? In our world people have all different measures of what is right and wrong. Now, obviously, there are certain things in this world that are naturally right and wrong, and most people would agree with the practices of Starbucks being “right” or “good”, but no one and nothing is completely, 100% right, or good. Everyone and everything has bad qualities. I have read way too many criticisms of the company and the way they operate to believe they are completely committed to doing what’s right in every area. I ran into a girl yesterday and was chatting with her about Starbucks. She had only worked there for 2 months after quitting because she hated it. I asked her what made it so bad and she explained the pay was not worth the work and the schedule imposed on her. This is just one of many examples of Starbucks falling short of their commitment to business ethics. I am not in any way putting the corporation down for all the things they have done to change the way corporations operate, but one must look into the reality of the corporation before accepting the claims presented here.
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You have found a really great resource for your paper. I was looking at the site you used for this and laughed when I read about what Starbucks had written about their ethics as a company. “What do business ethics and Starbucks have in common? Everything.” If they have everything in common with business ethics then couldn’t they write more than three short paragraphs about these similarities? Your commentary on the site has some really great questions that I was asking my self when I was reading it like what really is ethical? You should ask a variety of people about what they think about the company because the information you received from the girl that used to work there is really interesting. I got on google and searched for sites about Starbucks ethics and came across an article.
ReplyDeletehttp://media.www.ndsmcobserver.com/media/storage/paper660/news/2007/03/30/News/Starbucks.Founder.Speaks.On.Ethics-2814792.shtml
It is about the founder of Starbucks talking about how ethics will get a business a long way.
It is amazing to me that such a large corporation has such little to say about their practice of ethics. They sure are repetitive in saying that they are ethical, but there is nothing to back it up. It really does go along with our definitional argument and really asks the reader “what is business ethics””. That is not a good thing that a company’s page on ethics is asking the reader this. Instead of just merely claiming to be ethical, such a large company should be able to give exact reasons why they are ethical and include evidence. It does not necessarily deem them unethical, but it is still ironic and makes me want to know more about what they really do that is in fact ethical. You would think a company should have more to brag about than that!
ReplyDeleteA link I found on the Corporate Ethics site is a report about an issue that came up with the company. It is not a huge issue with the entire corporation, but it is still interesting. It is the only report filed by corp-ethics too, my company had four or five!
ReplyDeletehttp://www.corp-ethics.com/company/starbucks/starbucks-must-pay-100m-tips.html