Starbucks Says All 8,000 U.S. Stores Will Close for Three Hours to Retrain Staff — How Did This Escalate So Fast?

Another protest produced by the social-media era.

Starbucks announced today that on May 29 every company-operated store in the United States will close for three hours of internal anti-bias training. The shutdown covers 8,000 stores and 175,000 employees, and is expected to cost US$16.7 million in lost business.

The last time Starbucks closed on this scale was in 2008. Howard Schultz, not long back in the CEO's chair, shut every company-operated store in the country for three hours to retrain baristas on making lattes — a way of showing customers and employees how seriously Starbucks took the quality of its coffee.

This time is also about making a point. It is Starbucks's latest answer to the "Boycott Starbucks" campaign now running in the United States.

At Starbucks stores in New York and San Francisco over the past two days, QDaily saw nothing out of the ordinary. The angry words and the protests were all on social media.

In Philadelphia, where a Starbucks employee's discrimination against two Black customers set off the boycott, protesters marched on Sunday. The rally started outside the Starbucks, and protesters then went in to confront the manager.

"We don't want this Starbucks to make any money today," said Abdul-Aliy Muhammad, one of the organizers and a co-founder of the Black and Brown Workers Collective. "That's our goal." Protesters reached the counter just after 7 a.m., chanting, "Starbucks coffee is anti-Black coffee" and "We're going to shut you down!"

Protesters gathered outside the store in pouring rain. Inside, everything looked normal — except that most of the people sitting at the tables drinking coffee were Starbucks regional executives.

"Over the past few days, the Starbucks leadership team and I have been in Philadelphia listening to the community, owning our mistake, and talking about what we will do to make it right," Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson said in an apology.

Howard Schultz, the executive chairman who has steered Starbucks through several turnarounds, said in a statement: "We will learn from our mistakes and make sure we create a safe, welcoming environment for every customer."

It is the worst crisis Starbucks's current CEO, Kevin Johnson, has faced since he took the job in April 2017.

The Conflict Started With a Denied Bathroom Request

On April 12, local time, two Black men walked into a Starbucks in Philadelphia. Because they had bought nothing, an employee refused to let them use the bathroom.

In the United States, a fair number of fast-food restaurants and coffee shops open their bathrooms only to paying customers, and many doors have keypad locks. Customers need a six-digit code to get in.

The two men did not argue the point, but they did not leave either. They sat down, looked at their phones and waited for a friend — a local Jewish businessman named Andrew Yaffe.

Then the employee called the police, who arrested the two men for trespassing. They were released after eight hours in custody. The 911 recording, released later, has the employee saying, "I have two gentlemen in my café that are refusing to make a purchase or leave." After the officers arrived, they called for backup.

A bystander filmed what was happening in the store and posted it on social media. In the video, several officers in bike helmets stand around the two men.

Yaffe runs a real estate development company; he and the two men had arranged to meet to discuss a business investment. In the video he angrily tells the police that the men were waiting for him. "Why would they have to leave?" he asks. "Does anybody else think this is ridiculous? This is absolute discrimination."

A few minutes later, police handcuffed one of the men and walked him out of the Starbucks. The other followed right behind.

Neither man was down and out, neither looked homeless, and neither did anything violent. Someone called the police simply because they wanted to use the bathroom without buying coffee. It confirmed what American civil rights campaigners have long argued: whatever a person's social standing or education, skin color still shapes how they are treated.

The video has now been watched millions of times.

Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross Jr. said in a recorded statement on Saturday that Starbucks did not want to press charges, and the two men were released afterwards. They had been held for eight hours.

Benjamin Waxman, a spokesman for that office, said the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office had reviewed the case and declined to charge the men, citing "a lack of evidence of a crime."

A Starbucks spokesperson said afterwards that the company had no company-wide rule on whether non-paying customers may use the bathroom; each store decides for itself.

"The thing we are all wondering is why it had never happened to us, the white people, sitting there," a witness named Melissa Depino wrote on Twitter. The tweet has since drawn 229,000 likes and 180,000 retweets.

More than 40 percent of Philadelphia's population is Black. The city's Black Lives Matter group soon held a protest outside that Starbucks, and a boycott under the hashtags #ENOUGH and #BoycottStarbucks started on social media.

The mainstream media caught up fast.

The story spread from there. Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson has apologized publicly several times. In an interview on Monday, Johnson said the manager of the Philadelphia store who called the police on the two men last week had now left the company.

On Saturday afternoon, Starbucks posted an apology on Twitter. Later that day, Kevin Johnson issued a statement calling what happened a "reprehensible outcome," and said he hoped to meet the two arrested men in person to apologize. He also promised an investigation to help prevent anything similar from happening again.

"Starbucks stands firmly against discrimination or racial profiling," he said. "Regretfully, our practices and training led to a bad outcome — the basis for the call to the Philadelphia police department was wrong. Our store manager never intended for these men to be arrested, and this should never have escalated as it did."

Celebrities and politicians called for action too. Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney said in a statement that the incident appeared to exemplify what racial discrimination looks like in 2018, that Starbucks's apology was not enough, and that he would ask the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations to review the company's policies and procedures, and whether employees should be given bias training.

"Starbucks should be a place where everyone is treated the same, no matter what the color of their skin is," Kenney said.

The Boycott Heated Up Fast on Social Media, and the Political Capital Starbucks Built Through Equality Campaigns Could Not Offset It

Starbucks has closed stores to train employees before. Besides the barista retraining in 2008, in 2016, after more than 500 customers reported illnesses including salmonella, norovirus and E. coli, Starbucks shut more than 2,000 restaurants for four hours to talk about food safety with staff.

But this time is more serious.

Closing the stores may not solve the problem either. Under the hashtag #boycottStarbucks, the bad feeling on social media keeps piling up.

On April 17, the same thing happened again at a Starbucks in California. A video uploaded to YouTube shows a Starbucks employee refusing to give the bathroom code to the Black man doing the filming, while the white man with him got the code without buying anything. "Is it because of my skin color? Is it because of my skin color? I can't use the bathroom, but Weston" — the white companion — "can?" the Black blogger asks in the video.

With incidents like this following on, the online boycott of Starbucks, while no longer as hot as when it erupted on the 15th, keeps flaring back up and shows no sign of dying down soon.

Against the bad feeling piling up so fast on social media, the political capital Starbucks built over the years counts for nothing.

Under former CEO Howard Schultz, Starbucks did plenty of things that were good for society.

In 2014, Starbucks gave $30 million to veterans through the Starbucks Foundation, and Schultz co-wrote a book about veterans, For Love of Country, with Rajiv Chandrasekaran, a former Washington Post correspondent in Iraq. Later it launched the decade-long Starbucks College Achievement Plan, subsidizing employees' tuition so they could finish a degree.

Schultz also started a campaign called "Indivisible," selling a $15 coffee of the same name and promising to donate $5 from each bag to Create Jobs for USA, a fund he set up in 2001.

In 2015, Starbucks approached several American companies to offer 100,000 jobs to minority young people aged 16 to 24. Schultz promised that Starbucks would hire 10,000 young people who were neither in school nor working, and would open stores in poor neighborhoods such as Ferguson, Missouri.

That same year, Starbucks worked with New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton on a campaign to ease race relations called "Race Together." Besides putting "Race Together" stickers on coffee cups, Starbucks told baristas to hand the stickers to customers. That time the press was not kind to Starbucks or to Schultz. Commentators accused the company of wading into a grave social problem in such a lightweight way, and called it overreaching.

Also in 2015, Schultz published an op-ed in The New York Times saying he had no intention of running for U.S. president in 2016. "While we have built a great brand and used it to provide health care, education and equity benefits to our partners, including part-timers, there is more we can do as a public company," he wrote.

Only last month, Starbucks announced it had reached 100 percent gender and racial pay equity for all its U.S. employees, and promised to do the same for its operations abroad. Starbucks's own figures show minorities make up more than 40 percent of its U.S. workforce.

Over the Past Two Years, Americans Have Started Boycotts More and More Often

Starbucks's big trouble is the latest flashpoint on social media. A week before it, the hot topic on American social media was the Facebook boycott. Because of the user-privacy leak, a campaign urging people to delete their Facebook accounts spread on Twitter.

Look back over Trump's America and online boycotts have grown more and more frequent.

• October 2016, #GrabYourWallet — over Trump's offensive remarks about women, boycotters called on people not to buy any Trump-related product

Within three weeks the hashtag had picked up nearly 120 million retweets and likes. A few celebrities joining in made it bigger still, among them Ben Cohen, co-founder of the ice cream brand Ben & Jerry's and a supporter of the left.

• February 2017, #DeleteUber — anger at Trump's "Muslim travel ban," with Uber's then-CEO Travis Kalanick sitting on Trump's advisory council.

Newly inaugurated President Trump signed an executive order.

It would bar citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries — Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen and Libya — from entering the United States for 90 days.

People in major American cities took to the streets and to the airports to protest. New York taxi drivers planned to stop picking up passengers at JFK Airport from 6 to 7 p.m. on January 28, these immigrant drivers refusing fares in solidarity with the demonstrators at the airport. Uber did not join in. It even switched off surge pricing at JFK, letting travelers leave the airport at normal fares, which was seen as breaking the protest.

A campaign to boycott Uber and delete Uber accounts then spread across Twitter and other social platforms. In the end 200,000 people deleted their accounts, and Uber announced that Kalanick would leave President Trump's economic advisory council.

• April 2017, #BoycottUnitedAirlines — United Airlines dragged a passenger off a plane and was boycotted

On April 9, 2017, a United Airlines flight turned out to be four seats overbooked after boarding. Among the passengers picked to get off, a 69-year-old Asian man refused, and airport police dragged him off the plane, injuring him.

Video shot by other passengers spread quickly on social media, setting off arguments about airlines' high-handed rules and suspected racial discrimination, and people started the "Boycott United Airlines" (#BoycottUnitedAirlines) campaign on Twitter.

• October 2017, #MeToo — a campaign calling on people who had been sexually harassed to tell their stories in public.

On October 5, The New York Times exposed 30 years of sexual harassment by the prominent Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, shaking the entertainment industry.

Right after the well-known actress Ashley Judd told her story of being harassed by Weinstein, women came forward one after another to tell their own stories online, and the accounts gathered into a huge movement called #MeToo.

The anti-harassment movement that grew out of #MeToo swept the world and is still unfolding, with women in France, Japan and South Korea joining in.

Disagreements over #MeToo have even set off new boycotts of their own.

• February 2018, #NeverAgain — Amazon, FedEx, Apple and others were boycotted over gun control.

On February 14, Valentine's Day, a shooting at a high school in Parkland, in the Miami metropolitan area of Florida, killed 17 people and injured 14 — the worst high school shooting in American history, and the 18th shooting in the country in 2018.

The NRA, a lobbying group that champions the right to bear arms, stayed firmly against gun-control policies, and its CEO, Wayne LaPierre, accused the Democrats and the media of using the shooting for political gain.

A boycott under the hashtag #NeverAgain started on social media, launched by a student who survived the Florida shooting. A petition also went up on Change.org, calling on 25 companies that offered membership perks to the NRA to cut ties with the group.

Soon at least 15 companies said publicly that they would no longer give NRA members special discounts. They came from finance, transport and information services.

Companies that did not clearly refuse to keep serving the NRA were put on a new boycott list, which included FedEx, Amazon, Apple, YouTube and Roku. The tech companies made the list because they had not blocked the NRA's TV channel.

• March 2018, #DeleteFacebook — over the user-privacy scandal, people started a boycott of Facebook on Twitter.

• April 2018, #BoycottChanel — Chanel was boycotted over designer Karl Lagerfeld's contempt for #MeToo

"I'm fed up with #MeToo. I don't even eat pork (#BalanceTonPorc, the French version of #MeToo, means 'expose the pig'). What shocks me most is that unknown models needed 20 years to remember what happened, not to mention that these accusations have no witnesses for the prosecution." Asked what he thought of the anti-harassment movement, Karl Lagerfeld — the 84-year-old known as the Kaiser — drew anger online, and it turned into a boycott of Chanel, the brand he worked for.

In the Social-Media Era, Starting a Boycott and Joining One Have Both Got Easier

Harri Jalonen, a professor at Turku University of Applied Sciences in Finland, has cited a number of studies showing that social media can turn a small incident into a large, even global one very quickly. What travels most easily on social media is bad feeling and negative bias. That has something to do with a known pattern: people recall unpleasant memories more readily than pleasant ones. Social media magnifies it.

Before social media was well developed, boycotts mostly happened offline. People agreed on a time and place, gathered, raised placards, chanted the same slogans. A protest meant preparing matching banners, badges or clothes. In the social-media era a single hashtag can start a movement, and joining a boycott has never been easier.

Not every boycott makes sense. When New York taxi drivers struck in early 2017 over Trump's Muslim ban, for instance, more passengers turned to Uber. Uber had little choice at that point:

• Let surge pricing run as usual, charging passengers several times the normal fare, and it would certainly be accused of profiteering from a disaster;
• Bar drivers from picking up passengers at the airport — as a platform, it had no grounds for that.

In the end Uber turned off surge pricing in the area by hand, and was labeled pro-Trump for it. As it happens, Kalanick, then Uber's CEO, had backed Obama early on: he gave money, and in 2008 paid his own way to Washington for the inauguration.

People who join a boycott online by typing a hashtag or hitting retweet usually do not weigh things that carefully. Amazon, likewise, is a retailer that refuses to sell guns or ammunition in any U.S. state (before this wave of protests, big retailers such as Walmart did sell guns in some states), yet it was boycotted in February for not banning NRA content on its video platform as demanded.

Starting or joining a boycott with a hashtag is so much easier than an offline rally that it has also become more casual. In February, when Apple was boycotted for not blocking NRA content, many of the people organizing the boycott were sending their messages from an iPhone.

And once a company is tied to a political demand, it usually gives in quickly to calm the anger. For the people taking part, a victory of sorts has arrived. Whether the root problem gets solved is a far more complicated question.

The networks that speed up information make it easy for a protest to spread wider. They also push people further into either-or thinking.

Cover image from Visual China Group and VisualHunt