Fer the love of all that's good and holy.

A Christian group out of San Diego has found grounds for outrage over the new logo for Starbucks Coffee.

The Resistance says the new image "has a naked woman on it with her legs spread like a prostitute," Mark Dice, founder of the group, said in a news release. "Need I say more? It's extremely poor taste, and the company might as well call themselves, Slutbucks."

The group, which claims more than 3,000 members nationwide, is calling for a national boycott of the coffee-selling giant.{...}

Charbucks has gone from this

To this:

Notice anything different about the second one, other than that it's got a "slutty" naked chick on it? (Never minding the fact that the woman on the logo doesn't, indeed, have legs "spread like a prostitute," like Mr. Dice claims. She, apparently, doesn't have legs at all. )

Well, gee, Gomer, could it be that it's printed in black and white instead of color?

While Charbucks is selling this as a "keeping it real" move, this is more likely about money. Color in the logo costs money. And if they have to print cups and napkins, etc., with black, white and green, you can be sure the green is costing them coin. Switching to a black and white logo is the money saving equivalent of American Airlines taking one olive off every meal they served: it's a small move, but it's coin that can be used for other things. Like buoying up their decreasing stock price. Because that's what this is about: keeping those shareholders happy. They've apparently realized that they can't sell more coffee, so they've got to find the pennies wherever they can find them to keep the stock from decreasing any further.

But that's really beside the point: some Christian group is po'ed because there's a naked chick on the Charbucks logo.

Sigh.

Don't these people have anything better to do with their time? You know, there are millions of people around the world who are, with increasing regularity, falling victim to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (you know, famine, plague, war and pestilence) and this is what they choose to get their knickers in a twist about? A naked chick on a coffee cup? A logo that won't even be seen once the barista puts the cardboard coffee clutch on the cup? Get real, would you? Go and picket the Burmese embassy. Your social activism will be put to better use---and, ahem, it might actually accomplish something worthwhile.

Posted by: Kathy at 09:02 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 444 words, total size 3 kb.

1 I suspect what Mr. Dice is really upset about is that if you look really close, the right breast is labeled "soy, no whip". Your advice to Dice is spot on.

Posted by: BobM at May 15, 2008 09:17 AM (xRH1I)

2 Cripes! Talk about blood and stones. After they hoover my wallet for a four dollar latte every morning do they really think I have the extra coin to blow on a hooker? As Gob would say, "C'mon!!"

Posted by: Robbo the Llama Butcher at May 15, 2008 08:30 PM (ZqnQ6)

3 OMG....how desperate can people get. And here I thought us San Diegans were farther evolved.

Posted by: Jenn at May 16, 2008 11:06 AM (90r1G)

4 dude can bite me. Go save a strving child, willya?

Posted by: caltechgirl at May 16, 2008 04:21 PM (IfXtw)

5 More than that, it's Starbucks going back to that logo; it's the original one from Before Massive Fame. Though on another level, the critic is right - the "mermaid" (more aptly a siren*) on the Starbucks logo in question really is a sexual symbol. (* Medieval confusion making a "siren", while not mythologically originally a water-dweller like the mermaid, into a form of mermaid with a sometimes-split tail. And I tried to link to the wikipedia entry, but evidently that's "questionable" to your spam filter...?) The guy complaining about it is still a doofus, in that only students of medieval art are likely to be aware of the symbolism, and frankly the "previous" version of the logo (ie, the cleaner non-original one that was replaced by going back to the original) is more attractive than the "dirtier" woodcut. Maybe it's just me, but scales? Not so hot.

Posted by: Sigivald at May 20, 2008 05:40 PM (3iY68)

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