I’m annoyed by these ads on Facebook for Starbuck’s (Red) promotion. I’m not bothering to link to this nonsense. If you don’t know, for every coffee or whatever that you buy on December 1st, Starbucks will donate 5 cents (yes, $0.05) to an AIDs fund. Before everyone gets all “but gtnuumeen! it’s important to fund those groups” just shut up and listen. Funding those groups is cool, good job. Everyone should donate to charities because they help people. Awesome.

Now that the touchy feely is out of the way, here’s the cynicism. Don’t buy crappy coffee with feel good post consumer paper written all over it that they are just going to let you throw away as opposed to letting it be post post consumer paper, and don’t buy it just because 5 cents of your purchase supports AIDs. Tell you what. You go ahead and take that $3, and everybody else who is going to buy coffe, take that $3 that you would normally spend on your mochafrappanutflavoredwithsprinkliesandrasberryjuice and JUST GIVE IT TO THE PEOPLE THEY ARE DONATING TO. Holy crap! What a concept!

This means that, instead of the nice people trying to stop AIDs getting 5 cents, they get $3.  That’s 60x as much money. Seriously. Don’t buy coffee at starbucks. Donate, on your own, the money you would spend on the coffee or muffin to the AIDs people directly. Get a clue. Buy coffee if you want it. Donate if you want to. But seriously, of all the jackass marketing scams, the “buy our stuff and we donate” is pretty low.

Some yogurt place does this for breast cancer. Oh yay! Let’s turn in our lids for money! OOORRRRR, how about NOT make people buy your product and do inane things like mail little yogurty lids so you don’t know if one stamp is enough and it gets sent back to you and you say screw it. How about just donate the money. No games, no gimmicks, no more “look at how much we care”.  I mean, at least the yogurt people sell something everyday. Those donations can at least stack up. But this one time Starbucks crap? They want you to splurge and get coffee, and decide that you really enjoy being a pretentious boner and you will purchase your coffee there everyday. I dunno, maybe starbucks wants to boost sales or attention after having shut down so many locations. Maybe people realized with a $20 coffee maker that you too can save $100s a month. (Incidentally, you could donate that money too).

But it’s also laptops, and iPods, and all kinds of red and pink and whatever other color a campaign gets. WE GET IT, YOU “CARE”. WHEEEE!

Seriously, if you’re willing to spend lots of money on a product JUST BECAUSE they donate money… donate the money without buying the product. The charities will make more and you won’t actually be a jackass.

Now, if this was Dunkin Donuts coffee, Boston alone could save the world in a morning.

::UPDATE::

Go right to the global fund site if you want to donate directly.