My District Manager came to my store today to pay a visit, and while we were chatting he noticed that I had a couple of boxes of these cookies on my retail wall. Starbucks started selling these cookies a couple of weeks ago, and I figured it was just another snack item that would sit on my shelf and not sell as most of the items of this sort do. He grabbed one of the boxes and said that I may hear something about pulling them off the shelves due to complaints. At first I thought that there was maybe an ingredient in the cookies that had gotten some bad press lately, but then I realized that the only thing that has been given any attention lately is Swine Flu, and as long as the box didn’t contain little vials of that then that was probably not the issue. He handed me the box and told me to read the box, and this is what it said:
“THE OWL & THE PUSSYCAT by Edward Lear The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat, they took some honey, and plenty of money, wrapped up in a five pound note. The owl looked up to the stars above, and sang to a small guitar, ‘O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love, what a beautiful Pussy you are, you are! What a beautiful Pussy you are!’ Pussycat said to the Owl, ‘You elegant fowl! How charmingly sweet you sing! O let us be married! too long we have tarried: But what shall we do for a ring?’ They sailed away, for a year and a day, to the land where the bong-tree grows; and there in a wood a piggy-wig stood with a ring at the end of his nose, his nose, with a ring at the end of his nose.”
I did a little research and found that this poem was written in 1871, when some words in the English language had very different meanings than they do now. That apparently means nothing to all the angry people calling the Starbucks customer service line to complain about what is written on this box of cookies. So what do you think, should these cookies be pulled off the shelf? Just in case they are, I made sure to buy a box today.
