I could see a skeezy district manager doing it, but that’s about it (and FAR removed from the corporate offices, of course)
QSR magazine collects the data and does a chart every year. The 2017 chart isn’t out yet, but going by the 2016 chart, Starbucks had over 13k stores in 2016.
https://www.qsrmagazine.com/content/qsr50-2017-top-50-chart?sort=qsr_50_rank&dir=asc
"[…] That’s why I knew Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson’s statement on the Philadelphia incident was trash: “Our store manager never intended for these men to be arrested and this should never have escalated the way it did …”
Either Johnson is lying or hasn’t been white in America as long as I’ve been black in America. Calling the police is the epitome of escalation, and calling the police on black people for noncrimes is a step away from asking for a tax-funded beatdown, if not an execution."
The Starbucks statement as quoted is not at all at odds with the next paragraph. It’s rather simple to equate “never should have escalated” with the notion that the police should never have been called.
In fact, on Good Morning America, Johnson said,
“it was completely inappropriate to engage the police,”
The person that wrote that article strikes me as someone trying to leverage the publicity for their own agenda.
Sucks for that Malik guy. He’ll be lucky if HR doesn’t give him a stern talk about showing up on Twitter.
Or he’s just tired of one excuse after another and he got a little emotional. While I think he didn’t fully understand what the CEO is saying, he is correct when he says a white person threatening to call the police on a black person, especially a black man, it’s rolling the dice in terms of violence and death. it should not be without consequence when they do that for reasons that dont’ require police.
Agreed. Kind of thoughtless to post his face on twitter.
Not arguing that point. I promise. I mean, it shouldn’t be that way, but there’s far too much evidence to the contrary. About the one good thing you can say here is that at least it didn’t erupt into that kind of violence.
Well he went into a lot of personal stuff in that article, so this is not an abstract event for some; it’s internalized because it happens so often, too often.
You’re right about the lack of violence being a good thing.
It’s a terrible thing that, when we discuss the police and their reaction to POC, we can say; at least they were not hurt. Or killed.
I think the KISS principle is always wise. It seems hard to believe that an inner-city Philadelphia retail employee has an irrational fear of black people. He or she would be rendered non-functional every other moment when one walked by. Therefore, it’s reasonable for a reasonable person to conclude that there must be something more to the story. But hey, maybe that’s wrong. You never know.
I’m laughing at all these references to Trump voters. It’s a Starbucks barista, folks. Talk about an irrational fear of bogeymen…
And let me tell you, while I won’t pretend to understand what being in that situation was like, I can say this: I’d have been pissed at the perceived injustice. Being angry would only have increased the chances of something catastrophic, so kudos to those guys for being better men than me.
It seems hard to believe that you would think racism only exists in rural areas. You’d have to not listen to a single person of color to believe that. You’d also have to miss all the articles over the years about retail employees not treating people fairly, like throwing all the black people out the store because they think one black person stole something, or not showing someone a purse because they can’t fathom a non-white person able to afford it, or you know the other stories that keep showing up, again and again in that area.
And certainly better than me as well. But it gives you a very small insight into what it might be like. I feel useless in a discussion of what someone else feels. But I want to understand it.
As a bouncer I was always aware of how the other person might feel. I was always trying to de-escalate a situation. I have family that are LEO. And I can say they they were not shoot first scumbags. But I can also say that the assholes were the norm, not the outlier. I think it has to do with the people that want to be in the situation of a cop. A lot of them are ex-military. A lot of them want to have a position of power over others.
I do not want to paint law enforcement with too broad a brush. But there you go. Anyone with a better way should write it up and sell it to a community. Personally, I don’t know. But I think about it all the time.
That’s why I am against just firing the employees who are deemed the guilty parties. That just makes the employees the scapegoats for America’s entire history of institutionalized and structural racism. This isn’t just about a couple of rogue baristas ignoring the employee manual. I’m sure the Starbucks manual says, “DON’T BE RACIST/SEXIST/ABLEIST/TRANSPHOBIC/HOMOPHOBIC/JERKHOLE-IC!” all over it. It has to. Starbucks is a major corporation. But I’m guessing the manual doesn’t tell its employees how not to be racist/sexist/ableist/transphobic/homophobic/jerkhole-ic. This is key. I remember how the owner of The Elmwood Cafe told me that he didn’t train his employees to be racist. But he didn’t have to train be to be racist for them to act in racist ways. You have to un-train people. Racism is baked into America’s cake. It is the flour, the white, bleached flour.
So if Starbucks wants to truly make a difference, then they need to not just commit to ending discrimination in their coffee shops, they need to commit to being advocates for ending discrimination in America.
Nice turn of phrase.
While I like the idea of Mr. Bell’s final point, there is no economic incentive for Starbucks to rehab White cultural norms. Plus, they are an international corporate giant. Is it their job to fix all countries cultural disputes? Starbucks is not the problem here.
Well I’m not going to try and force Starbucks to fix racism or anything, but if the CEO is serious about wanting to address the problem, Starbucks is as good as brand, as coproration, if not slightly better, to push beyond their storefronts.
There are just too many people who think this sort of thing is… rare. It’s simply not that rare. What’s rare is the video coverage and people caring.
No, of course it isn’t. I don’t think Bell is suggesting it is. He’s suggesting that they do more than pay lip service if they care about the issue.
Calling the police period is potentially killing someone these days (maybe even you).
It’s just magnitudes worse if they’re black (and it’s pretty bad overall, so that’s saying something).