I just got off the phone with Kelly, a nice gentleman from Starbucks. If you're keeping up at all with this post, you know that Starbucks sent me an email asking me to call them. The email had a reference number. This struck me as a little odd, because I usually just get a form letter back. You're lucky if you get a personal response back at all anymore.

So here's the deal: the information listed on BuyBlue.org is wrong. The company does NOT send money to political organizations or candidates. People who work for the company may contribute, but as a whole, the company has no policy in which money goes towards one or all parties. I was also told that Starbucks has notified BuyBlue about the error and has requested that they take them off the site. So far, no-one has responded. Starbucks is now talking to it's legal team about it. Kerry thanked me for taking the time to call them and finding out for myself whether the information was correct or not. He said that the company has received a lot of nasty emails due to their name being on the "blue list".

Hrm...interesting, is it not? That's two companies out of the five who've actually responded back. Both claim that BuyBlue is wrong. Let's see if the other three respond back. This is getting good. I had no intention whatsoever to stop buying Starbucks, but I feel a little better now knowing that they aren't playing politics with my money.

Update: Out of curiousity, I checked out BuyBlue and this is on the front page:

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Where is the "the list", you ask?

Temporarily down. We are combing over our numbers with a fine tooth comb because we think credibility is important as well as legal defensibility. We will post a list of blue companies which have been factchecked and which we feel are as solid as they can be very soon. In the meantime, we are busy working on the next version of the site, which will be a huge interactive project. Please sign up for our mailing list so we can keep you updated with it's progress!

You know, credibility is important you knuckleheads. You should've gotten your shit straight before the damn list was put up. The "legal defensibility" comment made me chuckle. ;)