Learned at Starbucks

Never know where you'll find a surprising lesson in politics. So, the clerk was griping about the stupidity of consumers who apparently managed to have the following advertising image revoked:


According to the clerk, people found the image offensively reminiscent of the terrorist assault on the Twin Towers. He didn't have an image of it, but described it as you see here - a dragonfly approaching cups in a field of flowers. "It's not an airplane! It's a fucking dragonfly!"

I found the story surprising enough that I did some research into it. Apparently it's two years old already. But I found this which basically proves the clerk's claim:

The US-based coffee chain Starbucks has withdrawn an advertising poster that had been accused of mimicking the 11 September attacks.
The poster is an advertisement for the company's latest summer drink.

It shows two cups side by side, with a dragonfly hovering towards one of them, and the headline: "Collapse into cool".

Starbucks says that it "deeply regrets" if the poster was "misinterpreted".

The Seattle-based company said in a statement that it never intended to be "insensitive or offensive".

However, the article does seem to indicate that the campaign was pulled pre-emptively due to a jouranlist's inquiry about the posters, rather than an actual consumer complaints.

Snopes.com offers a great example of the outraged chain mail which has catapulted this poster into some kind of urban-legend status...