The Time Capsule: Readers weigh in on Smucker’s boycott
About a month ago I wrote that I’d save reader responses regarding the matter of Smucker’s (owner of Folgers) issuing a firm “no” to the request for support in saving the coffeepot water tower. A bit of financial help would have been nice, but I couldn’t even convince them to consider it in a future budget.
Many of you sent replies, and my intent was to forward them on to Richard K. Smucker, CEO. I have not yet done so, as each time I prepare to seal the envelope another note or call arrives.
Our subscribers are a creative group. Responses range from simple words of support to constructive advice. A Sioux Falls reader was the first of several who would offer incentives. He feels it best to send a note saying we’d be real nice and advertise Folgers if they’d be real nice and give us $20 grand. Among those advocating a similar approach was one who thought we should get signatures on a petition saying the undersigned would buy lots of Smucker’s ice cream topping if they’d send us lots of money. Another suggested that an assortment of crayon drawings and notes from children in the elementary grades would be persuasive.
Marguerite Hughes, a subscriber from Kansas, would go for the throat. She wants me to stand in front of the tower with a jar of Smucker’s jelly in one hand and a skillet of Hungry Jack pancakes (Hungry Jack is also owned by Smucker’s) in the other. While being filmed (she suggests the filming be done “by someone under thirty-five”), I’m to praise Mrs. Olson as the charming, unforgettable dear she was, then go into a raging condemnation of Smucker’s for so quickly shunning the Folgers Lady. I show my anger by calling for a boycott, hurling the jelly to the concrete, smashing it, and throwing the pancakes into a foot-opening waste-basket. Mrs. Hughes feels that, given the potential of this video “going viral,” Smucker’s would have little choice but to play ball.
Her idea is chilling. It’s dangerously close to extortion, an indictable offense that could get me ten years in the slammer. Apparently that’s the way she does business. Her husband must live an adventure. If this fails she would probably make other arrangements—perhaps seeing to it that one evening Richard Smucker pulls back his bed sheets to find a headless miniature wooden Swedish Dala Horse painted with the ominous words: “Valkommen, Richard.”
Another reader’s idea is to focus the boycott on just one Smucker’s product—Folgers. She has a novel suggestions for doing so. September 29 is “National Coffee Day.” The event could be used to stage a city-wide ban of Folgers. Everyone in town spends the day sipping coffee, but no one drinks Folgers, and a roving camera crew makes a video for Facebook.
This reader thinks city media would flock to town, the internet would spread the word, and donations—perhaps even an offer from some other coffee company—would follow.
Ideas galore, and I’m passing them along to Mr. Smucker just to let him know how minds out here are turning. He may not worry about most of this, but Mrs. Hughes would scare me to death.
Roy Marshall is a local historian and columnist for the Red Oak Express. He can be contacted at news@redoakexpress.com.