THE MORNING RANT: Did Alienating Their Conservative Customers Contribute to Nike’s and Starbucks’ Woes?

Starbucks and Nike are in corporate chaos, with declining sales and crashing stock prices. Both of these companies are scrambling to find remedies for their problems, with both having recently fired their CEOs.

Perhaps they might also consider apologizing to the half of Americans to whom they have made a point of showing their contempt.

There are a great many conservatives who were once loyal customers, but when these companies took a hard-left turn into woke activism in the last decade, we chose to vote with our dollars and stopped buying Nike and Starbucks products. Whether it’s called a boycott, or just a significant change in consumer behavior, these companies have a lot of former customers who are politically conservative.

What’s important to remember is that as satisfying as it is to deliver a quick financial kneecap to a woke corporation like we did to Anheuser-Busch (Bud Light), a smaller but persistent change in consumer behavior can still be devastating. While people didn’t cancel their already scheduled Disney vacations when the company decided to involve itself in Florida gender politics, a whole lot of families that would have otherwise scheduled a Disney vacation chose otherwise, and now Disney is reeling from declining park attendance.

Starbucks was a regular part of my life for years. It was a reliable, fresh cup of coffee while I was out running around, and the atmosphere of the shops had a certain special ambience. While it may have been a “boycott” that caused me to stop visiting Starbucks some years ago, it no longer even crosses my mind to stop there for a cup of coffee. My relationship with Starbucks now is like that with a former employer – it’s simply part of the past.

Laxman Narasimhan was fired last month as Starbucks’ CEO as its situation worsened and headlines like this became more common: “Starbucks Stock Plunges After Declining Same-Store Sales Weaken 2024 Outlook”

Meanwhile, these were typical headlines in the first half of 2024 about Nike:

“As Nike bleeds market share, investors worry over relevance” [Reuters – 3/21/2024]

“Nike warns of falling sales as upstarts crowd its business, stock sees worst day on record” [Axios – 6/28/2024]

Nike’s CEO, John Donahoe, was finally forced to resign a few days ago. “Nike CEO John Donahoe Stepping Down After Rocky Tenure”

Messrs. Narasimhan and Donohoe had the cards stacked against them. Their predecessors made it clear that those companies’ cultures embrace a hostility toward conservatives, and effectively told conservative consumers to take their business elsewhere. We did, and we never came back.

In case you’ve forgotten, here are some of Nike’s and Starbucks’ wokest hits:

NIKE

• Amidst the NFL flag protests, Nike stood proudly by Colin Kaepernick with an ad campaign featuring Kaepernick’s face and the quote, “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.“

• Nike canceled its Air Max sneakers with a Betsy Ross flag on it after Kaepernick protested to Nike that anything historically patriotic is racist.

This is the flag that Nike deemed racist.

The good news is that a whole bunch of us decided to “believe in something” too, so we stopped spending our money on America-hating companies such as Nike.

STARBUCKS

This article at The Street details just how repugnant Starbucks’ political activism had become.

• To show its support for the riots of 2020, Starbucks pledged $100 million to BLM.

• The company bashed the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling, and even offered to reimburse travel expenses to incentivize its employees to terminate their pregnancies. (I gather that paying for an abortion is cheaper than the cost of maternity leave.)

• Coffee cups were festooned with rainbows to celebrate LGBTQ. As I’ve said before, when I am at a restaurant, I don’t want any sexual behaviors celebrated, be they straight, gay, or other.

• Most pernicious was the company’s commitment to racial discrimination in the name of DEI. Starbucks pledged to discriminate against white employees and job applicants so as to get to 40% “Bipoc” (Black – Indigneous – People of Color) in retail stores and to 30% Bipoc at its corporate offices. (It’s interesting that Starbucks feels that a higher ratio of white employees is needed for corporate “mind jobs” compared to front-line retail workers. There’s nothing racist about that…) The National Center for Public Policy Research, brought a case against Starbucks for its racially motivated discrimination, but the case was dismissed.

Before woke business school graduates started destroying corporate America from within, management understood that it takes numerous new customers to make up for one formerly-loyal customer who becomes disaffected and takes his business elsewhere. No longer. In the executive suites of woke corporations like Starbucks, Nike, and Disney, it is now a sign of virtue for its executives to show how much they detest right-of-center Americans, and we have reciprocated their enmity by no longer purchasing their products.

Those companies could really use some revenue right now from the conservative former customers that they alienated, but actions have consequences – in this case they are well deserved consequences. We’re not coming back to rescue those companies that declared culture war against us. Get woke. Go broke.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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