Is the dip in Starbuck stock price due to the boycott by pro-marriage Americans?

National Organization for Marriage, July 9, 2012 

By Jonathan Baker, Director—Corporate Fairness Project

On March 21, 2012, the date of the Starbucks annual meeting where I queried them on their corporate support for same-sex marriage, their stock closed at a price of $53.81. This past Friday their stock closed at $51.97.

This is down from a high of $61.67 that they reached in April of 2012.

It takes a little time to make an impact when your target company has over $11.5 billion in sales.

With over 750 million shares outstanding, this drop in stock price since their annual meeting equals a loss of almost $1.4 billion in shareholder value. This
drop in value comes at a time when coffee prices, a major factor in Starbucks’ business expenses, are dropping.

Starbucks stock could bounce back today, and without a doubt, at nearly $62 a share, it was overvalued and our protest was only part of the equation.

What  the protest has done, and what you have helped us do as one of our supporters, is start to sway the conversation. There is no longer just one side of the
marriage debate telling corporate leaders that “equality” requires that the corporation take the position that the nuclear family is no longer important. Or that “diversity” demands that companies tell those employees who believe that fathers and mothers are both vital to the upbringing of a child that they are ignorant bigots.

Dr. Brayden King, a professor in the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, put it best in his 2009 article, How Protests Matter:

To say that protests don’t matter because they don’t immediately lead to drastic social reform or fail to have direct consequences in policymaking is taking a narrow view of what protestors are trying to do. Protests matter because they make issues part of the public agenda and consciousness.

Every article, every blog post, every Facebook comment, and every tweet, both positive and negative, helps to boost this effort. 

What you can do this week:

Call or email your local Christian or Catholic radio station and tell their DJs and news staff about the DumpStarbucks.com effort.

Share with them what Starbucks has done and urge them to inform their audience about the DumpStarbucks.com pledge. (You might add a plug for the www.DumpGeneralMills.com pledge as well!)