@Zagen
That's the part that's getting quoted most often but if you watch the video he said a bit more than that. It's worth watching just to see Schultz get interrupted by the applause from stockholders and the rest of the crowd. I dug up the transcript ...
Tom Stauber
My question is this and this is a really specific one. You always say, you mentioned civility and you’ve written about civility.
Howard Schultz - CEO
I want the question, sir?
Tom Stauber
My question is this, the human rights campaign which calls everybody a hater and a bigger, but they disagree on marriage, which is very hurtful and its design to silence people. When will you stop funding, Starbucks does, $10,000 a year and the organization uses a most uncivil language in a most direct way. [sic - obviously "bigger" should be "bigot" - I think "but" should be "because"]
Howard Schultz - CEO
And I welcome that question as I did last year because not every decision is an economic decision. Despite the fact that you recite statistics that are narrow in time, we did provide a 38% shareholder return over the last year. I don’t know how many things you invest in but I would suspect not many things, companies, products, investments have returned 38% over the last 12 months.
Having said that, it is not an economic decision to me. The lens in which we are making that decision is through the lens of our people. We happily employ over 200,000 people in this company and we want to embrace diversity of all kinds.
If you feel, respectfully, that you can get a higher return in the 38% you got last year, it’s a free country. You could sell your shares at Starbucks and buy shares in other companies. Thank you very much.
Edit : Video at Crooks and Liars
Edit 2: I realized after posting that the "recite statistics that are narrow in time" made little sense. I missed that Stauber had made a rambling comment about stock value and NOM's boycott about a year ago before actually getting to his question. Rather than editing and pasting it in, I'll provide the link to the transcript in case anyone cares. 2013 Annual Meeting of Shareholders Conference Do a find/search on "Stauber", it's near the bottom.
