Saturday, July 19, 2008

"Slutbucks" instead of "Starbucks"???

Just one month ago my old theater stomping grounds in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was hit hard by a 500-year flood that left the downtown and residential areas near downtown devastated. My theaters - Theatre Cedar Rapids and The Paramount - have suffered horribly...but they will survive.

Now, as Starbucks prepares to close 600 of its stores nationwide, Cedar Rapids was hit again - the Lindall Mall Starbucks is on the closing list. Bastards. Fear not, I looked up Starbucks in the CR yellow pages online and found six more stores listed.

In a related story from May, there seems to be some hub-bub over a retro Starbuck's logo that's being used for one of their recent promotions.

The Resistance, a Christian activist group based in San Diego, says the woman on a new Starbucks logo looks like a prostitute holding her legs open and suggests the firm should be calling itself Slutbucks instead. The group's founder, Mark Dice, is calling on the group’s 3,000 members across the US to boycott the firm. I'll jump on that right away, Mark Dick - Dice.
The logo, which is a replica of the one the chain used when it opened its first store in Pike Place in Seattle in 1971, comes from an old sixteenth-century Norse woodcut and features a bare-chested woman with a mermaid-style fish tail that is split in half. "The woman is actually a siren, not a mermaid, which in Greek mythology lures people to them with their beautiful songs, and then kills them," said Mr Dice. Dice and his right-wing, religious group needs to concentrate on matters - that matter. I dashed out to Starbucks today and lo and behold, the promotion is still going on. I picked up the last two mugs on the shelf (see above) with the retro logos - one for me and one for my brother. Score! Definitely collector items.

Starbucks insists the logo is only being used on a certain kind of coffee and some of the mugs it sells. Howard Schultz, who bought Starbucks in 1982, described the emblem in his memoirs as “bare-breasted and Rubenesque; [it] was supposed to be as seductive as coffee itself”.

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