Progress report

Bet you thought I wasn’t going to post, didn’t you? Oh, ye of little faith. :-)

Since I’m getting all school-minded now, let’s have a progress report. On the state of the nation’s educational institutions? On my district’s state report card? Nah.

On Starbucks.

Back in April, in an effort to reclaim dissatisfied customers and “get back to basics,” the Starbucks think tank decided to go retro. They reverted back to their original brown logo (at left, although it looks black), in hopes of sparking nostalgia and a “return to roots” feeling among their customers.

According to this article in Business Week, Starbucks brass heard loud and clear from their customers that things just weren’t working, so they boarded the nostalgia bus. I haven’t heard word on whether it’s worked or not. All I know is, $3 and up for a cup of coffee is a *little* steep for many folks.

Apparently, the effort they made back in February to improve service by closing down all their stores for a day of intense training and re-training didn’t have the desired effect.

I haven’t seen the brown logos at all at my Starbucks store. It’s the basic green like always, with the cleaned-up siren picture on it.

There’s a lot of misinformation about the siren, apparently. From what I could find out through research, a mermaid (with one long fin) is half human, half fish; but a siren (two long fins — see the old logo above) is part bird. Go figure. And the siren is not the gentle, benevolent creature of the sea that we’ve come to know and love through “Chicken of the Sea” commercials and movies like Splash. Sirens are evil beings, whose sole purpose was to lure sailors into the sea and kill them.

Nice.

Fink, done with the final project and ready for the weekend. It’s my birf-day.

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